Finished Metal Work - Part 1

Ok, here we have a selection of pics showing the completed body metal work done at Schirmer's Welding. Work was completed by August, 1999. At the time of these pics, I had the car in storage and these were taken in June of 2003.

You need to understand that in order to accomplish all of the metal work associated with what you see, it was necessary for the Schirmer's to take the car body (removed from the pan), cut it in half door-to-door through the rocker panels, flip each side (front & rear) upside down to access the underside hard-to-reach parts of the car, make patch panels as necessary (you can't buy aftermarket panels to make all of the necessary repairs), then turn the halves upright. Next they bolted the mended halves back down onto the completed pan, and stitched the halves together by rebuilding the rocker channels, including the convertible-only additional channel stiffener metal. I think this process was chosen as the Schirmer's do (or did) not have a auto rotisserie, which would have made the whole process much easier in terms of handling. It also may have been impossible to do all of the welding using a rotisserie. This is because, with the top frame and the doors removed, the only thing holding the front and back havles of a Ghia Vert together are the rockers, and they were marginally intact (although surprisingly so).

Had I to do this work on my own, or to start again knowing what I know now (20-20 hingsight), we probably should have used one.

For those of you interested you can Google 'auto rotisserie' and you can quickly see plans and pics for building your own from scratch using tube steel, etc. - which I will do on my next project (in this life or the next).