12 Feb 03

My brakes have arrived! These are complete tall spindles with 12" brakes from a 96 Impala SS. I'll end up changing out the rotor, bearings, and calipers, but I'll save the parts for later use, I'm sure I'll need them for something. Pictured with one of the rear drums to give a sense of proportion. Found the proper setup for the rears, check out this website for details. Basicly, it's 93-97 Z28 rear discs; I don't have the details yet about what e-brake cables are needed though. I may have to figure that one out myself, since the website is geared towards a 1st gen Camaro. The rear discs are 11.6" in diameter; should match the 12" fronts pretty well. It might be fun to do the 13" front brakes detailed on that website as well. Still time to decide.

This is one of the bigger holdups right now. This is the trunk filler panel which is not currently being reproduced. Goodmark has plans to start producing them, but they're saying 6-9 months away. I don't want to wait that long. I figure the three choices are:
  1. Wait until November or so for a new panel.
  2. Cut this one out, weld in the quarter, fill the gap with a sheet of steel
  3. Cut this one out and make something really close.

I think I'm going to try #3 to start; we'll see how well it works. That should be this coming weekend's work. I'll need to brace it all together so I can figure out how it needs to fit once I cut it out and try to make a pattern.

Here's where it's going to get painful. This is the bottom part of the rear panel, above and in front of where the rear bumper attaches. This area will be visible, and there is a depression that the molding fits into that I must maintain. The new metal sticking out is, as mentioned in a previous update, some 18ga steel to patch the structural panel below this one. This is too thick to make the kind of bends I'll need to make to replicate this area; so I think I'm going to keep my GM car all GM by recycling the rust-free portions of my old quarters for this. Call it... a skin graft, if you want.
The major rust in this pic is below the top of the bumper and won't be seen, but the vertical tears/holes show that the metal is very thin here, so I'll need to patch in areas that can be seen as well.
This is the area to the right of the license plate; again, most of it is below the top of the bumper, but it all needs to be fixed.
Same idea, but the other side of the license plate. Not quite as bad. I'll need to create two long panels to replace the under-bumper strips (which I don't really have good pics of). Again, I'll have to cut
The bottom of this bracket had rusted away with the pan it was attached to; I've got to make a patch here and blend it together so it looks like one piece. Shouldn't be as hard as it sounds (yeah, right).
At least the driver's corner looks OK.
I am not an expert metalworker. By the time I get suitable replacements for all these bits, I might be.

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