1949 Chevrolet Gasser Left Rear Rocker Panel Repair

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Arthur Lever’s project car for class work at The Hot Rod Institute in Rapid City, South Dakota.  He wrote:

I have stopped working on the wheel well openings as the rear door sills and rocker panels need to be repaired before the wok can continue on the wheel wells. Progress is being made on both sides but thought I would only show pictures of the left side so that jumping between the left and right side does not cause confusion in what you are seeing.

   So this is what I have to work with. There is enough to see the basic form but not much more. There are certainly enough holes that the car will fill with smoke on the first burn out!
       

   Here is the offending piece cut out.

I tried to make life easier and purchased the rocker panel extension for an aftermarket vendor. In the pictures below you see the comparison to the form of the original body part to the form of the aftermarket piece. They are not even close.
       

   So I dropped back yet another step and created the floor piece using the original piece cut from the car as a form

I then created the correct curve to match the rocker extension from the floor piece.
       

Then I modified the aftermarket piece to fit the curved piece that was made to fit the floor piece which was made to firt the original piece. Then the forward part of the rocker panel was created.
               

   All those pieces were tacked together and then the work on the inner rear wheel well started.

I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. I was given some suggestions on how to get to this point, but kind of went my own way. I certainly learned some good stuff along the way!