Steady progress on both cars over the past couple weeks. My buddy Brent has been reconstructing my left rear quarter panel because we found a botched repair from a previous accident featuring over an inch of filler slapped on the side. He’s also been fixing my rear wheel lips on the quarters since they were cut by the previous owner.
Here are a few photos of the wheel lip process. New lips are radiused on the inside to allow proper wheel fitment.
And now onto the quarter panel. Brent has done this twice before, his last time a few years ago on a friends imported 200SX. He starts with a scan of the quarter panel on the right side (right side has no filler so the panel is factory dimensions of course). And loads it into fusion360
From there he sections out the quarter panel in order to make a wooden “buck” (mold) to shape the new quarter panel on. With this technology, the new panel will be an exact replica of the factory panel down to a thousandth inch.
He then loads up the dimensions and cuts the buck out with a custom routing machine, and assembles.
After that, he begins shaping the panel.
Once everything is fitted and in spec, he welds the new metal onto the car (antenna is deleted as well, forgot to mention that)
Pretty insane if you ask me. Incredible skill and talent going into this! More photos of the original botched repair:
Whoever repaired it before must’ve been a sculptor. The entire body line, curvature, creases, everything behind the wheel on the left side was completely filler.
So for the purple car, the OEM Kouki Skirts and valance from the white car are now going on the purple car, along with a 180sx kouki front bumper and wing. Hot Road skirts and valance will be going in place on the white car. I’ve also picked up some Minerva’s for the purple car, and began mocking everything up
Front fenders will be coming off and replaced with some single vent 20mm’s. The hood is also being replaced with a factory metal hood. I still haven’t entirely decided what I want to do with the rear overs yet. Sucks the stock body has been hacked up.
I’ve gotten most of my parts in for the SR rebuild on the purple car, I’m just waiting on a few more items to show up before I can fully reassemble.
Well anyways, that’s about all I have for now. Hoping to update everyone sometime in the next few weeks with some major progress. Cheers~