Bad News from Body Shop - Time and Money Can Fix Anything!

Guess things had been going too well.  Darrell called today, said he couldn't get the hood to sit right inside the front fenders.  Turns out when the car was wrecked on the driver's side front  upper, inside sheet metal was shoved over to the passenger side, making the rectangular opening for the hood kind of diamond shaped.  The fenders and front clip can all be mounted correctly, they're all just shifted over to one side.  I captured the effect in photos, shot from front down towards ground but even with outside edge of fender, drivers side first:

Notice how you can see most of the knockoff protruding from the fender.  Then here's the same view on the passenger side:

Almost none of the knockoff is visible.  So we believe the frame is OK (wheels are attached to the frame of course) but the sheet metal the fenders attached too is shifted towards the passenger side by about 1/2 inch.  Looks like the car will be making a trip to a friend of Darrell's who has a frame jig where he can push/pull the upper interior sheet metal into it's correct position.

Here's some more pictures, Darrell is doing very nice work, under hood looks great, inside spare tire compartment looks good, front clip is very straight, door jambs are painted.  If Darrell had not run into this "bent front end" issue he thinks he would have had it painted by the end of this week!

Body Shop Updates

Visited body shop on March 27, floors and outer sills are in:

Then went back on 4/8, more progress, trunk is done, edges around floors are finished, most of body work is done except for fenders.  The white stuff is hard caulking to seal up welded joints.  You can see he's just now getting going on welding up holes in fenders.

The trunk turned out better than I expected:

Darrell was able to even retain the old welded on nut for mounting the gas tank strap, that thing was just a mound of rust last time I looked at it!  I didn't get pictures of them but the doors, hood, and trunk lid all look real good, ready for paint.  I didn't see the front clip and forgot to ask about it.

I'd say we're about a week or so away from starting to see some Signal Red paint on this thing.  Darrell has a guy cleaning up under the hood for painting.  Sure gonna be fun to get this thing home!