Sometime in the last 48 years, one of the owners did a really terrible job of deleting the chrome trim from the car and hiding all the seams. They basically just folded all the seams over with a large hammer and put 50lbs of body filler on the car. While I want the seams to be deleted, I would certainly have done a much better job… but we get what we get.
I do want the chrome trim on the rear kammback area of the GT6, but those seams were folded over as I mentioned. I tried to unbend them, but that proved to be near impossible and was just damaging the already fragile bodywork.
After a lot of frustration I decided to cut off the folded over panel joints and butt-welded all the panels together. That put the strength back to hold everything together, but now I had no way to attach the chrome. The easiest solution I could come up with was welding tabs back where the seam would have been, and that seems to have worked great!
The final issue I saw was there were a lot of gaps between where the trim fit and the body. I’m not sure if the gaps were this bad from the factory or if the molestation of my car’s body is to blame, but either way I want this car to be show-worthy, so I went to work. I ended up doing a combination of building up the metal in some places with weld, and in other places I added sheet metal to make it join up to the trim better.
The gaps aren’t perfect now, but they are really close, and it will take probably 1/16″ of body filler to make them perfect when that time comes!
