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Old 03-13-2018, 06:01 PM
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pplace pplace is offline
MetalShaper of the Month March 2018, August 2021,November 2023
 
Join Date: Jan 2018
Location: Hector, MN
Posts: 294
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This update will focus on rough fitting of the roof and rear window back onto the car.

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Because of the amount of chop, I decided to add width to the roof rather than tipping the posts inward. This would have made the roof look rather narrow (I did test this in Photoshop) and the sideglass to angled in.

However, I did lay the windshield back slightly for my visual preference.

Here I've started locating the driver's half of the roof roughly into place. I've added more square bracing to help support and locate it properly so I could measure and fine tune as I progressed.

If you look close, you can see I've "sleeved" the windshield posts for additional strength in the joint later.

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View from the front. I even have a few 2x4's helping support the floppy roof skin at this early stage! Hey, whatever works....a guy only has so many arms to work with!

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This view from the rear shows how I started to locate and hold the rear window section in place. Again, I added square bracing horizontally and vertically to temporarily support it after careful measuring.

If you look close, you can also see that I have now split the rear window opening in half and widened it. I discovered the need for this in my early masking paper mockups.

Look at the bottom corner and you'll see how narrow it would have been in regards to the quarter panel edge. If I wouldn't have widened the glass, this area would have been so flat with no shape and wouldn't have had nice flow from the glass into the roof and quarter panel. I'd rather of not had to modify the glass, but the overall look of the finished project is certainly more important in the long run.

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The view from the side. At this stage I was just looking for the proper look and flow of the roof and back window into the quarter panels and decklid.

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This picture straight from the back with both roof halves on shows how much I had to widen the roof. Again, at this stage I'm still really just roughing in the panels, so I just tacked "bridges" across the roof joint to hold things together.

This also shows the added width of the rear window opening better.

NOTE: I made a bad "miss trim" on the passenger roof to rear window! Oops! Again, some temporary bridges hold it until I correct the problem later. When you are doing this much trimming, cutting, and fitting....it doesn't always fit together right away! If I remember correctly, my measurements were a bit out of square vs. the other roof half, so I moved the roof forward slightly to get all measurements correct.

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I certainly wanted to save the nice original windshield "V" and roof peek. To do so, I cut it out as shown. From here, I lined it up correctly and got it ready to tack into place. (it's not correct in this picture as the driver's window opening isn't exactly inline)

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I added two thin strips on each side to make up the difference in width and tacked it all into place.

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Here I'm testing and trimming the rear half of the door / window opening. Trying t come up with the most visually appealing look in the end. Again I went through many ideas in Photoshop to see what might look good or not.

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Here the roof and rear window are basically tacked into position, checking the look before I finalize anything too much.

NOTE: You'll notice that I forgot to mention earlier that I also cut and moved the tulip panel / front trunk jamb forward significantly and up slightly.

I knew from my photoshops, that I would need to do this in order to help the visual proportions of the car. If I didn't, the decklid would look way too short and the tulip panel would be massive.
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