Stuff They Never Tell You: Pre-Fitting Parts Part 1

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When building a car (or having a car built), one thing you never hear about is the mock-up stage, or pre-fitting of parts. The truth is, most high-end cars (for example, well built street rods or full-blown customs or even high-end restorations) are built this way. Essentially, the various bits and pieces are tediously hand fitted to the car while it’s either in bare metal or covered in initial epoxy primer. Then the range of components are massaged to fit and when everything is perfect, the thing is blown apart for final body and paint. That’s why, when you examine these cars carefully, gaps are close to symmetrical and the panels fit nicely. They look great. But honestly, Detroit never fit their stuff this well.

Fair enough. It looks fabulous. But if you pay a shop to do this work, you might be a wee bit shell-shocked when you see the final bill. The reason is there’s just a lot of going back and forth fitting pieces until it’s right. It simply takes time. But you can do much of the tedium at home, without special equipment.

Mocking up components doesn’t have to be painful. But you might have to move some pieces around and fiddle with them in order to make them fit precisely. Trust us, it’s a whole bunch easier (and less painful) to do it now rather than when the car is painted. And while we don’t have room to lay out each and every detail, what follows is a look at some of the basics.



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When you’re working on a car, it’s a very (very!) good idea to roll the car outside on a regular basis. Most home shops (ours is a good example) are basic two car affairs. It’s tough to get a good perspective on something when you’re two feet away.

Fitting things like the tail lights (which by the way are reproductions) and the back bumper can sometimes prove troublesome. As it turns out, the reproduction tail lamps were over the top great in terms of quality and fit.

On the other hand, the repaired bumper (which was fixed after an accident) took some tweaking to get right. There’s a small amount of movement on the bumper by way of the mount brackets (each end of the bumper) along with a small amount of movement on the chassis where the brackets are attached. By using the available adjustment (or probably more correct, the factory “slop”) to our advantage, we managed to get the fit right on target.

We rolled the car outside again to double check bumper, taillight and fender fit. As pointed out earlier, it’s good to have some distance between you and the car to “eyeball” stuff.

Some things such as the fenders we installed and removed multiple times (as you’ll soon see). Yes, it’s a pain but it’s the only way to get things right. Also, in our case, the right rear quarter was replaced. This gave the opportunity to double check fit.

Heater delete pieces are one example of why we needed to remove and replace a fender more than once.

But let’s start the beginning: Fisher Body never drilled the holes on the blower motor side for the round delete plate. We had to do that with an eye toward symmetry.

The big plate and the firewall both need a bit of “fine tuning” (hand bending) so that they conform to one another. The heater box flange had to be bent up and it also meant small incremental bending, hand tweaking and pulling of both the plate and the firewall by way of fasteners.

The heater delete set up finally came together. With the fender installed, we could get a better idea of what it all would look like completed.