As other work proceeded on the car, I noticed that there were some bodywork problems on the driver’s side of the car. So, because we’re going to respray the front clip in blue, it wasn’t much more work to re-spray and doors and lower rear quarter panels in the same color, at the same time. In this way, there will be no color-matching problems which would have been acute because the resprayed blue color wasn’t the authentic ‘57 color to which we’re returning.

The first problem was that the lower part of the driver’s door isn’t coplanar with the adjoining quarter panel. We’re going to fix this.

Seen from alongside the car, it’s not hard to see how the bottom of the door kicks increasingly as it goes down. This looks awful!

I also notice a stamping flaw in the area at the bottom of the flare, at the front of the rear wheel well. Remember, these were very mass produced cars and the stamping dies weren’t well tuned so much of the time.

The problems found on the driver’s side aren’t found on the passenger door – check out how beautifully the radius of the doors matches the radius of the rear quarter panel. Notice the gentle “inward” radius of the body work.

The leadwork at the bottom of the door on the driver’s side was really a mess. George is grinding down the uneven lead work to get a constant inward curve.

It won’t be hard to spray the blue color. We’ll just tape off the trim and the white paint, and mask the newly sprayed frame and underbody.

Only a thin skiff of high-quality “polyester surfacing resin” (as bondo is euphemistically called by body men) is needed to fill in the uneven areas.

We’ll prime just these areas, guide-coat and prime the same, and then spray the color after thoroughly block sanding the blue-painted adjoining areas.

George removed the window whiskers, the vent window assembly, door handle and keylock so we can get a really tidy job when respraying the factory blue paint.