The quarter panels on my Cutlass were, unsurprisingly, some of the worst hit by rust on car. As you can see from the pictures below, they were completely eaten through both in front of and behind the wheel. Additionally, the drivers side panel was full of bondo from a previous (and really poorly done) repair.
As usual with these cars, the disassembly consisted of drilling out a ton of spot welds. In this case, it also consisted of marking off and cutting out the panel around the perimeter. I did this with some painters tape about 1″ away from the edge all the way around, except for the rear bottom where it was so rusted out that the whole thing needed to be removed. Once the panel was off, I also found out that the drip railing for the convertible top was rusted through, so that had to be repaired. I also needed to rebuild the rear bottom of the inner wheel well since it was completely gone. I sanded all the interior metal down, and hit it with some rust reformer to stop any further oxygen aggression. Post those repairs, I went in with a bunch of seam sealer where the worst rust was. The car will rarely if ever see the rain under my stewardship, but I want it to be done right just in case.
Now that the internal repairs were done, I welded in a lot of backing strips around the perimeter. Since I planned on butt welding the panels back together, this gave a good base to prevent punch-through. Then it was just a matter of tracing the old panel I removed out on the replacement panel, and cutting everything out. This left me with a nice panel that fit well in empty space. Once I was happy with the fit, I started tacking the repair in and slowly welding around. This was a very slow process to avoid warping the panel with heat. I also took this opportunity to weld up the quarter panel peak trim holes, since I won’t be putting those back on the car.
Now for the final part of the repair. I mentioned before that I was not a fan of the indentation around the wheel wells on the ’68 cars, and had been trying to decide how to best deal with it on my car. I finally made a decision. It’s one that’s not going to make a lot of people on the site happy, but since I’m paying the bills I think it will work for me. It also goes along with the pro-touring and more modified look I am eventually going to end up with!
