Project No-Flight Update
November 2004
Continuing with the body work, the body panels behind the rocker panels were too full of holes and cracks to save. Since they will be exposed with the side pipes, I cut out all of the old fiberglass and fabricated new panels to bond in. Here is what hides behind the original fiberglass, part of the steel birdcage framing.
And here is the new panel ready to bond in place. It was fabricated from a section of fiberglass angle so it will provide a rolled under lip the full length, which will match the original section at the back end of the rocker. The lip will make the replacement panel much stronger. It will be bonded and then filled and smoothed since I plan to leave it as a painted body surface with no metal trim behind the side pipe.
While I was in a fabricating mood I decided to try my hand at making moldings for the sides of the windshield. I've decided to leave the smoothed dash panel lip without the factory trim, but needed some molded smooth covers to go over the riveted plate on the windshield uprights. These are the first parts I've vacuum bagged using polyester resin to match the rest of the body. The form is cut from plywood and the vacuum used to pull the mat and roving down around the form.
I didn't add any coloring to the resin, so the resulting parts are transparent (and hard to photograph). They will be trimmed, sanded, and painted to match the dash (unless I decide to cover the dash in vinyl, in which case I'll do the covers to match). The ridge is from the crease in the bag that is required to pull it down over the wide end. It is just a little resin flash and will be sanded away.
Here is a trimmed molding next to the wooden form block. I discovered when going to fit the passenger side molding that the windshield post on that side was 1/16" wider than on the driver side. I originally thought it was just another example of Corvette quality, but a little "exploratory grinding" revealed that the top right portion of the birdcage had been replaced. Instead of but welding the new section or using a joggle joing they had just spread the top section and pressed it over a length of the original metal framing. Since I didn't want to strip the fiberglass off to cut and weld the sections I widened the mold with several layers of masking tape and pulled a new part for the passenger side. That makes 5 moldings to get 2 usable ones.
Here are the rough trimmed moldings clipped into place. They will ultimately be held by one screw in the base section and with adhesive tape at the top where their access is blocked by the roll cage tubes. I clamped the new passenger side molding into place while it was still a little green to allow the sections to spread and fit themselves to the post shape a little while it made the final cure.
