Want to hang a 55 quarter panel .tips needed

[Rick_L]

Bob I thought you had asked this question some time back.

I used the Sherman panel on mine. It is a hardtop panel and requires that you use the existing forward upper original panel, cutting and welding it like shown in Cnut's photos. For me, it was a pretty good panel. The bead around the wheel cutout is not as crisp as original but I fixed that. The rocker area in front of the wheel cutout wasn't bent far enough and that had to be fixed too. The area around the gas tank door had the contour flattened from punching the hole and that was fixed also.

My only knowledge of the Golden Star panel is what I read on these forums. It has some problems too. One area is in the wheel cutout. The Golden Star panel is a full factory style quarter panel including the quarter window frame, and the panel goes over to the trunk lid cutout (the Sherman panel stops at the vertical peak).

I think Danchuk sells both of these panels. These are the only two you should consider - no half panels, etc.

There may be some photos and discussion here, but I'm sure there is far more at trifive.com. if you do a search.

[chevynut]

Bob, I've never used a 55 panel so I can't really answer. That said, I think there's only two choices, the Sherman panel and the Golden Star panel, as Rick explained.

That said, I think I would personally deal with the Golden Star panel from everything I've read about them. As Rick said, they include the correct "dip" at the quarter window so you don't have to weld there. The dip on a HT is different and you'd have to cut it out.

I did see one panel for a 57 that had a vertical cut at the wheelwell and it was spot-welded together. I would NOT use a panel like that myself.

Also, two areas that were problems for me with the Sherman panel were the door jamb and the taillight area. As you can see in my pics I left the original taillight sheetmetal on the car and cut it off the Sherman HT panel I used. I also cut the door jamb area off and left the stock one in place, because I didn't like how the bend was formed. To me, Sherman would have been better off just eliminating the door jamb and taillight in their tooling.

I think you're going to run into some mal-forming issues with any aftermarket panel, so be prepared to do some hammer and dolly work.

Are you sure you even need to replace the whole panel? How bad is it?

[Rick_L]

The Sherman 55 hardtop quarter panel has the same issue as Cnut's 56. I didn't use it at all, instead making a weld seam about 3/4" back from the door opening.

My taillight openings appeared to be OK, but I had already done some work on the original taillight openings so I elected to cut and weld in the taillight area similar to what Cnut did.

When one complains about taillight openings, keep in mind that the originals were not all that consistent either. Same with the trunk lid opening.