Installing A New Quarter Panel On A 1971 Chevrolet Camaro - Quarter Pounding

10 With the old quarter-panel and drop off removed from the car it's time to start cleaning up all the edges in preparation for the new panels. Depending on how close you got with the initial cuts, this will either be easy or time consuming. Chances are you will need to use a combination of grinding and cutting wheels. If you're going to do this yourself, be sure to budget in a realistic amount of cash for grinding and cutting supplies. They're not cheap and you can go through a stack in a surprisingly short amount of time.

11 One of the harder pieces to remove is the door jam area. It's tempting to leave this in place and make the new quarter fit to it. Don't do it. Take the time and do it right. The extra time spent here will be saved when you have to do the bodywork down the line. Besides, more seams means more places for cracks and failures over time. The first thing you'll want to do is find all the factory pinch welds. Several of them are located around the area of the door striker.

12 After grinding through the paint to find all of the pinch welds, use a grinder to dig out the welds and free up the panel. Once all the welds are ground down you can use an air chisel, cut off wheel or other tool to remove the jam from the car. This is one area where the plasma cutter won't work well since it could damage the parts of the car you want to keep in place.

13 To clean up the area where the quarter-panel meets the roof, first drill pilot holes through each of the pinch welds. Next you will want to use a larger bit or stepped drill bit to completely bore out the old welds. Once done, you should be able to remove the last remnant of the old quarter-panel.

14 While Dick worked on removing the old quarter-panel, the cars owner, Jon Lindstrom, started prepping the new Goodmark quarter-panel. The first step in getting it ready to go on the car is to clean the black coating off all the areas that will need to be welded.

15 To make welding easy, and provide a better bond, you will need to add holes every few inches in all the areas to be welded. This metal punch makes things easier, but a drill would work as well.

16 Here's what you should see when the areas are cleaned and punched.

17 The rust wasn't as bad on the passenger-side quarter, but the body damage would have been a major pain to repair. There was also rot in the window channel, just like on the driver's side.

18 The passenger-side quarter-panel comes off just like on the driver's side. Again you can check the trunk drop off and inner wheel well. In our case the drop off was trashed, but surprisingly the inner wheelhouse was in perfect shape. We were sure that given the sorry state of the quarter the wheelhouse would be toast, so we had a Goodmark replacement (PN 4021-675-70R or L, $59.95 each) ready to go. It looks like the replacement panel would have been a good fit, but we were happy to save the five hours of labor it would have taken to replace each one, not to mention the cost of the parts.