Tony's 40 ford

Once the inner panel pieces were all tacked together we installed it on the car to check for fit and final welding. At this point we had already started fabrication of the rear of the cockpit which we will get to in a minute.

With both pieces appropriately shortened, we sand blasted all the crud off of all four sides and coated the bottom of the top and the top of the bottom with Rust Bullet before tacking them back together. After checking for fit on the car again, we fabricated and welded on a strip of 18 gauge steel around the edge. this restored the thickness that we lost when we cut off the folded over outer piece in the first step and we made it a little wider so we have extra metal when we are fine tuning the trunk gap while doing bodywork later in the project.