I am currently workin on body work in which a friend and i cut the rear panel off the donor car and welded it on in a few days time, surprisingly for an 18yr old and 17yr old it came out exceptionally well, heres a few pics,
Before replacin it,

And the careful measuring of the donor,

And after all the stress and questioning of ourselves it came out like this,
Oh well i have to find my camera to post this picture sorry

 

looks fun. good luck on that. cant wait intill after pics.

 

ya i need to get the camera from my dad and take some recent pictures. all i need is to fix the bodywork on the rest of the car.

also looking for a passenger side turn signal lens so if you need any parts for an 83 let me know

 

well i got some new pictures, here they are.

lemme know what you guys think

 

pretty impressive!!! i'll bet that took quite some time!

 

looking good!

 

For an 18 and 17 year old, nice work. It's good to see young guys like to play with welders/plasma cutters/bench grinders... I started with my oldest son at 14, using those tools and now he has fabbed up a few things for various family members. One was a headache rack for his grandfathers truck.

Glad to see and definitely nicely done.

 

ya, my dad made a tool out to put a lip on the fender. but ya, i think it came out pretty good, were just finishing up the bodywork, and then im going to paint it. i've decided a bright red, don't remember the name of the color though

 

Wow, wish i had those skills, good job

 

its was actually more time consuming than complicated, first time i used my friends 110v wire feed a laid a damn near perfect bead, i was suprised. but im doing all the bodywork and he did the welding. next im probably going to jump into fiberglass just for the hell of it.

 

You are learning some good skills there. I cannot tell from the photos if you used a flanging tool, sometimes called a joggling tool. If you did not, you should consider getting one before the next job. I bought mine from Harbor Freight for $40, been using it for nearly 20 years. The head is shown in the attached photo - left side makes a joggle in the edge of the sheet metal, and the right side punches holes.

The scheme is to joggle the edge of the lower panel, so the upper panel lays flush. Then you punch holes along the edge of the upper panel, clamp it together and put a weld in each hole.

The skills you are learning here are the same you would use for custom work when you get a bit more experience. The hard part with custom body work is just deciding where to cut and fit the pieces. I attached a photo for your amusement that shows the beginnings of fitting a piece from and RX-2 onto the back of an RX-7. The finished product is shown on my Cardomain page. We pieced that car together using the front half from an FB and the rear half of a 79-80, which gave us space for a full sized spare wheel.

As for the fiberglass, that is a good skill to have also, but for custom auto bodywork, "Steel is real".

 

yeah, you did an excellent job on that man.

 

i didn't buy one, my dad made one out of vice grips and some 1/2 square stock, used only a file to make it too.
you got done some badass work there stilletoman, My friend Kyle is the fabrication guy, he can make just about anything out of metal. i like doing the bodywork and painting, but im going into metal trades class at school this semester i'll be learning mig and tig welding, CNC, and general machine work. so hopefully i'll be able to do some stuff that comes out that nice

 

really nice work. looking good keep it up.

 

Holy crap stiletto man, i just checked out your crazy projects on your site, WOW

 

Still doing bodywork, and hopefully will get it all ready and painted by the end of summer. I bought some turn signals off ebay and new carpet. I stripped all of the interior out of the car and im going to wash it and buy me some dynamat for the inside. one of my storage bins was broken, so im trying to come up with something to take up the space where those were.