Saving the Swallowtail

[Mk1sleeper]

I had a successful (but big) day yesterday, I took the golf in to my good mate John's shop.
After measuring up the damage he deemed it was not bad enough to put on the robot, so we set it up on the rack, which is basccally a bunch of steel which has been thoroughly bolted to the ground to allow the car to be pulled from all sorts of angles when used with different accessories (no skid steer required).

Despite my promise, I was so swept away by repairing the car that I forgot to take a lot of pics.
we pulled the quarter panels out by drilling a hole just above the taillights.
that got the quarters straight, but it was obvious that the inner panel needed to come off.

So it was drilled off and we continued to pull it out.


It became obvious that the opening had been pulled in a long way by the impact, we measured up the new large taillight beaver I had and it showed it was nearly 25mm in,so we pushed the pillars apart with a port-power, while dressing the beaver back into shape.

I'm sure I took more photos, but they aren't on the phone I'll take a photo of where it's at now tomorrow.

Lewis the young guy who did most of the work did an amazing job, and for a young bloke knows his stuff, he was also happy to learn from my experience. It's good to see a young guy having a go.
Next is a heap of shrinking and dressing up to get it all dead straight again.

[MozzGTI]

So good to heard it's being saved! Looking good. Any more progress with it? Suspense is killing us!!

[Mk1sleeper]

Hi Mozz, the rain combined with a few unexpected family expenses (my wife has spent $4K on her ageing cat at the vet in the last 2 months!) has slowed things down. I've started preparing the new inner panels, and at the moment I'm deciding whether to replace the areas above the tail lights as well. They are badly stretched, and even with a heap of work may never be quite right, even though you wont see them I'll know they're not right.
I should have some progress pics for you soon!