20) Rollin' out into the sunlight

Its not very often that I roll the bug out, but it was a nice day! It's also good to inspect everything in the bright sunlight. You can see that I've cut away the lower left door hinge section, and it's all sand blasted. Next, it's time to weld that section in, and start getting this front end all wrapped up!

19) New kick panel mocked up

Here's the new kick panel mocked up into place. I set the body down to check the alignment of the kick panel and the floor pan.

18) Left lower door hinge pillar

Here's what the left side looked like before cutting it all away. You can see where I had welded in another hinge section. So much rust to sandblast!

17) Right lower door hinge pillar

Here is a piece pulled from a southern car (Thank you www.thesamba.com). I carefully extracted the metal needed to just replace the lower pillar (including the hinge mount. This is after sandblasting and trimming. I lined it up to the car, marked the line on the car, and cut. Using a file on both parts, I was able to get it to line up just right.



After welding and grinding, and a coat of primer. I'm not welding the lower section to the heater channel just yet because I want to be able to line up the doors before I tack them down.

16) Time out, garage time

So at the time of these photos, it was getting cold, and I was finally fed up with working at sub freezing conditions. The garage that I rent is not heated, and the space was just too big to heat, without shelling out $1,000's of dough. So I built this "box" around my entire operation. Best part is that I can store tons of stuff on top! Now I've got a nice little space to heat. I bought one of those vent-free propane heater, which works great!