My neighbor helped me get the car up onto the body cart. That went pretty well. I was surprised. Cart dimensions are perfect for what I am trying to do with it. Which is to allow me to cut the floor out and drop it down and out, and to put the inside of the roof at a good level so once the floor is out I can stand on the ground and work on the interior of the roof easily.
Now I have the ability to roll the body around wherever I want or to roll the frame out to work on that if I get sick of doing bodywork. However, I'm really having fun with the bodywork and it is very rewarding when I finish a section and see results.
Now that the car is on the cart the first thing I did was to remove the rest of the firewall. This was done with a zip cutter to get the majority our and then all the edges where it was welded to the body had to be cleaned up to find all the spot welds. Then the spot welds were drilled out and the metal pried off.
In this pic you can see the firewall has been removed and you can see the remaining metal where it was welded to the side of the body. These little strips have to be removed by grinding, drilling, cutting, or whatever will work. The new firewall has to have clean flat metal to weld it back in the exact same spot the old one came out of. If it is not exact there is a good chance some future part wont fit.
The following two pics show the metal edges have been removed and ground do smooth ready for the new firewall.
However, I cannot install the new firewall until the floor has been replaced because of the way the parts fit together. I did try a sample fit to see if it was going to work and it looked pretty good.
Next I am going to work on the interior roof and get the front window channel fixed. This is the main reason for the cart. To do this I needed to cut out a section of the floor where I will stand to do the work. And to do that I needed to install some braces so after the floor is removed the car does not shift in shape. It must stay perfectly square like it is not and the floor is a key part to making it stay that way. So I installed a cross brace to make sure the width did not move and then two diagonal braces to insure the car could not become a parallelagram.
After the braces went in I cut out about half of the floor which gives me room to work the front part of the ceiling and the front window channel. Once that is done I will cut the remaining floor and finish the roof and rear window channel.
Here is the area I will be working.
This will take some time because the parts I have are for a 70 Chevelle and this is a 68 but there are no parts for a 68 in this area so I need to modify them extensively.
So far I am really happy with this car. Its a lot of work but I have not come across anything that I cannot do and have not found any evidence that the car cannot be restored completely and by now I would have because with the car off the frame I have access to see pretty well underneath where I couldn't before.
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