M. Requin

Carlos, glad you brought that back, and the way the lines work in that image says yeah, leave the wheel arches alone!

Jerry Feather

Yes, Carlos. Those thoughts are also still on my mind and in particular in regard to the Wheel Arches. My alternate thought is that I might still keep the original openings, but maybe narrow them a bit at the front and back, and otherwise just move them up in the body as it is sectioned. However, I would, or will, still raise the front arches up into the upper part of the body but only by an inch rather than the full 2 inches of the section. The rear arches would or will keep their shape except for the narrowing front and back. That's all a ways off, so still plenty of time to go over it in my mind. However, some of it makes a difference in how I cut the quarter panels for the tail shortening of the car.

Jerry Feather

Martin, the phrase "brought that back" kind of struck me as odd, mainly because I have for a long time (months) been logged into Rennlist twice and in one of them I keep this thread up and scrolled down to this image and then leave it there so I can study it every day during or at the end of my usual surfs.

Now that you have removed yourself from my ability to blame you for the round arches, I guess I am back to probably plan B which is to leave them pretty much the same except for maybe shortening them front to back about 1 or 1 1/2 inchs total.

As to the differences in the image from what the end result is going to be, first is that we are no longer going to shorten the wheelbase of the car, so the space between the rear wheel arches and the back of the doors, except for about an inch, which I'll be explaining later, will be closer to the same. Also, the hatch area and tail of the car are going to be quite a bit different. One thing is that the hatch window will be farther forward into the hatch itself; and the other thing is that the tail of the car will not be quite as short as shown in the image.

Jerry Feather

I cut out a chunk of the roof aft of the sunroof opening, which might seem like a loss of perfectly good roof. We are going to have to fill in the large opening in the roof left by the sunroof and by the expansion of the roof outwardly by the movement of the roof quarter sections, but why, you ask, take out any more roof than needed? There are two reasons. One is that the side cuts of the roof are right at the original apex of the roof, from front to back, and the metal forward of that line is actually sloping down toward the front. However since there is going to be an 8 inch gap right at the apex we need the roof aft of the new apex line to slope slightly upward to the new apex, rather than downward. The other reason is that when we get to grafting in some new donor roof skin we need to be able to reach the underside of the welds with our hammer and dolly technique to make the new hammer welds. With the dolly in my left hand I can't reach under the roof any farther than my bent elbow, so the weld line needs to be fairly close to the rear edge.

Jerry Feather

In order to make the B-Post cuts as close or even closer to the ones on the driver's side on the other side I made patterns of the cuts and refined them so that the cuts should end up more precise. I'm going out shortly and make some of the remaining cuts to have all four quarter segments of the roof loose.

Jerry Feather

I also have the cuts layed out for the rear corner of the C-Post. It will move forward about 2 inches and outboard about the same. I hope all the cuts work out like I plan.

Jerry Feather

I did get the third of four roof sections cut loose and trimmed for its new location. Tomorrow i'll work on the fourth.

Wisconsin Joe

Random thought: As much as we complain about how small and stupid the sunroof is, you might think about an early 944 sunroof.

Big, manually operated, removable.

I think it would be a big improvement.

Jerry Feather

I put in quite a bit of time on this project today and made some pretty good progress. I got the last quarter roof cut loose and fit, then I layed out some of the possible lines for the rear quarter panel cuts, these based on the idea of keeping the original wheel arches except for shortening them front to back some. Then I decided to cut the rear quarter window corner loose and move it to its new location and that turned out to be quite a chore.

Jerry Feather

For the quarter window corner movement I first cut out the piece of skin that is going to be eliminated, mainly to see what was inside, besides the bee hive. I found another third member in there which made the cutting out of the piece a little more complex and kind of butchery inside. That doesn't matter since I don't think I'll try to weld it back in.

Then I got the piece loose and cut it off at the upper end then began grinding on it to get it to fit where I want it to end up.

Before cutting this corner loose I had measured the horizontal distance that I need to take up and on the top edge it measured 5 inches but on the lower outboard top edge is measured only 4.5 inches. I haven't figured out why. Now, after moving the corner out and forward 2 inches, I find that there is only about an inch and a half to two inches of the C-Post gap to fill with moving the tail of the car. I can't figure that out either.

I was kind of counting on shortening the tail of the car 3 inches, mainly for the balance in looks with this other body work, but it looks like I will have to settle with 2 inches. Actually that will make that event a little more easily accomplished. Even the 2 inches is going to take some adjustment at the B-Posts to get the tail of the C-Posts to line up correctly.

Jerry Feather

One of the things I just figured out in regard to the sectioning of the car is that the vertical part of the car on the side aft of the door is quite a bit lower than I had thought. When a 2 inch section is taken out there that is going to result in about an inch of offset along the rear lower edge of the door. I was counting on that being only about a half inch, and I was going to use that half inch to narrow the rear wheel arches in front and then another half inch in back. Now I am looking at an inch each way, and I am not sure I want to go that much. Nevertheless, these pictures show where the cuts might be, but also based on the original idea of shortening the tail 3 inches. I'll have to do these over when I finally decide just how much the tail is going to get shortened.

Jerry Feather

That is not a bad idea, especially if I were somehow stuck on having a sunroof. But I am not; and I am pretty much counting on the inch and a half of head room that I am gaining by eliminating it.

M. Requin

"Chopped and channeled" looked so easy in the 50's.

Jerry Feather

Actually, Martin, the only aspect of this project that relates to "channeled" will be the floor if we decide to lower it. Since everything that surrounds the floor(s) is in reality some of the "frame" component of the unibody, by lowering the floor in respect to the frame we will actually be doing a sort of reverse channel. On the other hand, sectioning is not the same as channeling, except perhaps in the resulting appearance, in some cases.

Jerry Feather

Today I took the first roof quarter section off, the left front one, and began doing some of the internal refining of it getting ready for welding and later trimming. Since we have to weld all three layers of metal in the posts I have to cut out the inside layer so that the middle one can be welded then I'll put a patch over the opening and weld it in place. That will be required on three more of the 6 posts. I'll have to do something similar to each side of all 4 roof patches. Then when I get to that part of it I'll have a bunch of welding to do inside laying on my back welding overhead. I wonder how that is going to go.

I also did a little work on the driver's side B-Post and find that I can move it around a little, actually refining its fit, and thereby regain some of the lost tail shortening. I think I am going to finalize the tail shortening on 2 1/2 inches which is a nice compromise between 3 inches and 2 or less. I moved that quarter of the roof back about an eighth of an inch and ground some on the gap to get it to fit better and to allow the tail of that piece to drop just enough to give me back the gap I now want. Moving it slightly actually made some of the joints close up some, but it opened one up a bit, but I think I'll be able to close it with weld filler rod.