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| One of the first things I had to do was repair all the rust damage on the donor body. Fortunately that was not a lot. One of the worst spots was under the battery tray. The front of the inner fender was gone, along with the inner support mount for the battery tray and body attachments point. I got a new support from jeff's Bronco Graveyard and some sheet metal from a local shop and started patching. |
| The drivers floor pan was the other rusty spot. Although only the back half was bad, so that is all I replaced, figured why do more work than I had to. I also cut the origonal transmission hump out and replaced it with one I got from Wild Horses to go with the NV4500. |
| Then I needed to cut out the rear inner fender wells for the new shock towers. I got a little worried here, since the 73' chassis was already built and had the shock towers in place, I couldn't drop this body on till I installed the cut outs. It took a lot of measuring, remeasuring and reremeasuring, before I installed these. With some skill and luck they lined up perfect when the body went on the rebuilt chassis. Here you can see all the new parts in and coated with por-15. |
| Also picked up some new front fenders from Jeff's. A pretty nice fit right out of the box, not perfect, but close. A little cut here and there and they bolted right in place. |
| So, now that I had all the new sheet metal welded in, I lifted off the body and put in on stands so I could coat the underside with por-15 and chassis coat. |
| After that we dropped the body on to the rebuilt chassis. Nice to have a friend with a lift. |
| Here is the drivers rocker removed and waiting for a new one to weld in. I would have replaced them before I swaped the body over if I had known how bad they were. Whoever did the body work on this truck before, loved bondo. The rockers on both sides were concaved, but you would never have known, untill you stripped it. It is amazing what you find when you start taking paint off. This vehicle was not pampered, that's for sure. It was green when I got it, and I foound red, blue and orange paint under that. Along with a lot of dents. |
| Here we are ready to tape everything up and paint it. Yeah I know i skipped a lot of in between, but I don't want to relieve that experience any time soon. It goes something like this; hammer, fill, sand, fill, sand, fill, sand, prime sand, sand, sand, sand, and on and on. Then after about 10 months (part time after work) it looks like this. |
| Then when you have your friend spray paint on it, it looks like this. Now you are probably wondering if this is my shop. No, it is a good friend of mine, Allan Sheply who owns Mustang Central (see my links page). Without his help and guidance I would not have this thing even close to done and would probably be even poorer than I am. Since I have never done any body work, he took me under his wing and tried his best to guide me through this project. For my first time, I think it came out pretty good. I never really wanted it to look as nice as it turned out, since it will be getting scratched up, but it is hard to purposly do a half assed job. |