Well I knew it had to happen sooner or later - the first big screw up. When I put the front half of the roof back on, I should have spent more time double checking the alignment. Long story short, there were 3 big alignment problems.

  1. Getting the windshield posts cut down to the correct height
  2. Getting the windshield posts straight
  3. Getting the windshield posts at the correct width

Each one of these measurements were extremely close by themselves, and were not noticeable from 3 feet away. Put them all together, weld it up, and you think, hmm, som'n just ain't right here. The height of the posts wasn't noticeable because the top roof sections lined up ok, but they only lined up ok because the front half was tilted down slightly, which means the posts weren't straight. Plus, I read the tape measure wrong when checking the width of the windshield where it was chopped. I should have narrowed the front part by 5/16 instead of only 3/16.

So basically all the work you saw in the last two articles had to be completely redone. Filler strips had to be cut out, front of roof removed, split, and narrowed another 1/8", and put back together again.

 

This is a small round steel rod laying on top of the roof. The light coming under the rod shows that the front section of the roof (to the left) is slightly higher than the rest of the roof.

The difference is more noticable as I slide the rod down the side of the roof. This picture is looking up at the ceiling. Just barely out of view at the bottom is the drip rail.

Now the rod is down in the drip rail channel. The front roof section needs to be narrowed another 1/8" because the drip rails don't line up.

While trying to figure out what went wrong, I clamped a piece of angle iron to the windshield post. You can see that the top half is leaning back slightly. It's not noticable without the straight edge.

The driver's side is easier to see with the light behind it. It ended up taking a lot of hours to fix this.

I didn't take many pictures of fixing this mess. I had to cut out the filler strips, slice the front roof section in half to shave out 1/8" and tack the 2 halves back together. I originally taped off exactly 2" to chop out of the windshield posts. I didn't take into account that the top of the roofline slants down from the back of the car forward. Then when I had to move the front half of the roof forward to line up the posts, that half had to drop down an extra 1/16 to 1/8" in order for the roof line to flow smoothly from back to front.

After spending a few days grinding and cutting and test fitting, I was ready to start welding again. This time I started by tightly clamping the piece of angle iron to the front edge of the windshield posts so they were perfectly straight up and down. Then I had to make sure that the filler strip in the gap would flow smoothly from back to front. That took a lot of squinting and rubbing back and forth with the filler held in place with magnets and clamps. Then I had to make sure the drip rails were perfectly aligned on the sides. All these points had to fall in place without forcing them, or the sheet metal would be warped or buckled.

In other words, it took a long time and a lot of trial fits to get this right.

The new filler strip was shaped to fit much better than before.

Lots of clamps and double checking later, and it's looking much better.