55 F-100 Bodywork Page
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The day after I came home from college, my dad and I had discussed changing the suspension over to something with a better ride so that he could drive it to work if he wanted to. To me, that meant tearing the front clip off to get a better look. Then we decided that we'd better yank the cab off to see what kind of bodywork we had in front of us.
The drivers door had blown open at some point and smashed in the door pillar. Originally I was going to leave the filler in but, as my bodywork skills improved, I decided I was going to hammer it out. Luckily I decided it was too far gone to hammer out. Someone had beat the panel in and used a grinding wheel to scuff the metal for the filler. My only choice was to cut it out and add a new panel in its place.
This is some of what we had in store for us. We knew that the bed was a lost cause. Too many years of hard use and botched brazing and bondo repairs. The cab also had some ladder marks in the roof as well as a little bit of rust in the corners of the floorpan. The front valance had been smacked hard a few times and both of the front fenders had 2 ft horizontal lines in them that were hidden by 1/4-1/2" of filler.
We decided to give ourselves a little more room around the engine so we would have easy access to the valve covers and HEI distributor. We moved this section of the firewall back about 3 inches.
Once we had the suspension installed we had to remount the cab, radiator support in order to align and cut the inner fenders for the Camaro section of the frame. Once they were cut, I didn't really like how they looked so I added a lip to the edge. It was a lot of work but the finished look was worth it. I ended up having to rework one of them as the control arm would hit after we had all of the weight back on the frame.
