1956 Chevrolet BelAir Car Restoration Project - Part 10

By Steve Nicholson

The work on the trunk floor continues...

The replacement trunk floor panel was carefully trimmed and fit into place. We temporarily held it into place with some Cleco fasteners during the trimming process. We also wanted to check the fit of the outer tail panel before we welded it in, just in case some adjustments were needed.

The panel is shown here before it was welded into place. The blue color on the floor panels is a product made by Spray-On, which is a spray dye used for layout. It works well for scribing lines during the trim and fit process. The new panel is also bolted to the frame through the holes for the body mounts.

It's best to fit all of the panels together when doing any type of metal replacement. In this case we needed to make sure that the trunk lid would fit and have the proper gaps with the tail panel. Also to make sure that the trunk gaps on the sides had not tightened up because of the old metal that was removed.

This is the new tail panel.

The tail panel took a little time to fit to get the right gaps. After we had it fit into place the trunk floor was welded.

This is the bracket for the trunk latch. We carefully cut it off the old floor so that we could use it again. This was also pre-fit before it was welded.

Another part that we saved was this bracket for the trunk alignment pin. More to come...