Bodywork in May and June
Current work has focused on repair of sheet metal. While the car has a good sound body, there has been some metal replacement, nothing unusual. The shop working on the car (Skip at McCabe Restorations) is pretty familiar with 1950’s Italian cars, and the sheet metal work is fairly straightforward.
The photos show (clockwise from top left):
1) work on the front end, and replacement of one of the headlight buckets and a bit of work on the front end (correct some geometry at the grille).
2,3) the tail fins have been repaired to go back to original smaller tail lights. Luckily there was a great deal of undisturbed metal, and by not modifying what was original metal, plus contouring per the original bumper, we were able to reconstruct the fin profile pretty clearly.
4) rocker repair – the outer skin has been removed, and the two inner skins are visible. Skip says this work is extremely straightforward from here on out.
5) Fuji and Skip doing a quick contour check. They found a straight line on the car along the top of the rockers (at the bottom of the door openings), and ran a string to check for the shape of the rear quarters on both sides – which were overall within 1/8” of each other, pretty good!
Interestingly, I was lucky to have received a number of photos of s. 2 cars, and the shapes of the fins do vary from car to car. Some are more pronounced, others a bit softer in shape. But like the rest of the car, its classic lines keep changing depending on where you are looking from.
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