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Nice break in the weather and I got to spend some time with my wife out in the garage working on Penelope. My wife is weirded out because I make her talk to the car. when she bumps it, I make her rub the spot and tell her she is sorry. she says she has the Christine creeps when she does that hahaha.

With all the floor, and rocker work and taking the B pillar loose, I was only off 1/8" on the post back to the floor. Not bad for eyeball but I will get into place shortly.

Got a quote of $350 to restore the hood badge.

Another nice NOS item to add to the collection.

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Garage is clean, rearranged and ready for the summer build to continue. Unfortunately due to the unseen damage especially with 1/3 of the inner rear wheel wells rotted, there is no way I would in good conscious continue the exterior body work with out flipping the body. That said, I am designing and building a Rotisserie, this is the only way I will be confident that the body is complete. I will get pics up as I go. The fun part is gonna be teaching the wife to weld, after all, this is her project too. :)

playing with the new metal stretcher and shirker making templates to begin forming sheet metal for the wheel wells. Not an expert, but this is fun.

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got almost a full day out in the garage today, What a Labor of Love, slow and easy.

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Trimmed and welded in place.

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Man that looks AWESOME, keep up the good work!
Wes

Nice day out in the shop not expecting to do all this body work is becoming more fun as time goes on, the wife is becoming a master of cranking the handle of the metal Stretcher/Shrinker.

Now don't laugh but I had to rebuild a missing lip/stiffener and found that pcs from an erector set works wonders. Once done that wheel well is solid as a rock.

welding and rough grinding done tomorrow I will feather the welds in and make it a bit prettier. The nice part is with the Reynolds Wrap fit up, all but one small seam will be visible which means a lot less smoothing an feathering needing to be done.

Hope to finish the passenger side this week and then rotate the car and begin the driver side. There is great pleasure in rebuilding one of the great machines of Detroit yourself instead of farming the repairs out. Will it be perfect? No, but I will have the pride of keeping the breed alive.

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You are doing amazing work! I wish I had your skills!

Thanx 51. I call myself a Novice too, this is my first restore. In another life 25 years ago, I use to cut new bronco's in half stretch them and make 4 doors out of them. this was prior to the explorer. That is my extent of automotive. All my work is in Aircraft and I can say it is much easier to build and repair aircraft than this old girl, but what a blast I am having.