Tail pan replacement photos

[Geoff]

Anybody have pictures of a tail pan replacement?

Please post if you do.


Thanks!

[givie]

did you find anyone with pics, I could also use the help

[55 Rescue Dog]

I need to replace mine too. Hard to tell what is supposed to look like, when it has rusted off.

[chevynut]

I guess I don't understand what you guys are looking for :confused:. Once you have the parts, it seems like the assembly of them would be obvious. When finished it should match the rest of the body and line up with the lower trunk lid.

[chevynut]

There's a bunch of pics here, maybe they'd help:

https://www.google.com/search?q=55+chevy+tail+pan&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjl7eOI_e_JAhVI8mMKHWRdDB0Q_AUICCgC&biw=1280&bih=869#tbm=isch&q=55+chevy+tail+pan+replacement

[Rick_L]

Once you have the parts, it seems like the assembly of them would be obvious.

There are sandwiched and overlapping parts. Once you know that the trunk floor is sandwiched between the tail pan brace and the tail pan, that clears up a lot of confusion, and to that end Cnut's comment is relevant.

The other thing I would suggest is that you fit every piece and fasten with tack welds and sheet metal screws. Then blow everything apart and finish weld/plug weld as needed, starting with the trunk floor if you replaced the rear part of it (or all of it). That goes for the trunk corners too. The tail pan and tail pan brace are the last two things to weld permanently. You can plug weld all the sheet metal screw holes. Remove a few of the screws at a time, skipping around, until all are out and plug welded.

When I did mine, it was one of the first sheetmetal restoration tasks I did. It was pretty straightforward and I did a nice job, even with a bit of learning some skills at mig welding sheet metal. This is a good first job at this stuff if you are new to it.

The hardest thing to deal with is the inner trunk corners, because they fit like crap and it's difficult to weld them and grind the welds because of the placement and access. Good news is that it's not an area that's easily seen. The outer trunk corners don't fit well either but are easier to fix.

[markm]

From the way I remember my 56 which unlike my 55 is pretty much original in this area the stock pieces don't fit that well together.

[Rustaddict]

Rick is right about the trunk corner patches being a poor reproduction. The other part you are not going to like is the bend in the bottom of the reproduction tail pans does not match the sharper bend in the quarter panels where they mate together.

[Rick_L]

My experience is that the tail pan, brace, and rear part of the trunk floor are pretty good reproductions of the original. Trunk corners, inside and out, not so much.

One thing you should do when you start repairing this area, which I forgot to say about earlier, is that you should have the trunk lid on the car and make sure it's aligned to the old tail pan before you start cutting pieces off the car. Then align the new tail pan to the trunk lid as part of the fitting of everything.

This becomes difficult if you have severe rust in the trunk floor and inner trunk walls (because the quarter panels end up drooping) but you must do it. If you are replacing the quarters and inner trunk walls too, then you have to fit everything before finish welding, especially if you have few points of reference.

The biggest problem I see on the trunk area of these cars is that the factory did a poor job of making the trunk opening fit the lid. As an example, on my car I was easily able to align the trunk lid to the opening near the rear window and to the tail pan. But on one side I had a huge gap between the quarter panel and lid in the area where the lid transitions from horizontal to vertical. This area was also low on the quarter compared to the lid. On the other side I had the opposite problem, the gap was narrow and the quarter was high compared to the lid. This on a car that had never been hit in the rear. Some people blame the lid on problems like this but if you look and check things you'll see that's usually not the problem. A bit of cutting and welding fixed this.