The primary thing to remember about fibreglass is that while it bends like
metal (for small deflections) it does not stretch like metal. This has large
implications when bolting a panel to a car that is not straight.
Back in 1990 when I first started my TR6 restore, I thought of doing a quick
and dirty body job and using some fibreglass panels to save my non-existant
money. The problem was that my TR6 had been accidented in its past and the
tub was not perfectly straight. When I attempted to put the rear quarter
panels on I ended up with a "waist" right over the rear wheels. That is to
say that the panels narrowed in at the middle of the wheel arch. It looked
as if somebody had wrapped a metal strap around the car at the middle of the
wheel wells thus pulling in the panels. For a metal panel all you would
normally do is grab the wheel arch, give a heave and the whole panel would
have taken on the correct form (great simplification)for you then to bolt
tight. But with fibreglass, no such adjustment is possible. You have to
deform the car to match the panels or the end result will not look right.
When I tried the pulling approach all I did was move the waist to somewhere
else.
I ended up having to pull off the fibreglass panels and buy new metal all
the way around and do a complete body job. Only my valences are original.
I am sure that makers of panels would claim that the above example is unjust
as it asks their product to make up for errors in the structural shape of
the vehicle. In today's unit-body cars assembled with sub-millimetre
precision they would be correct. However I am told that the LBCs were often
delivering only sub-inch precision. That can cause some real issues when
putting materials of greatly differing characteristics together.
If you have a perfect body tub (is there such a thing in an LBC) and good
panels, I am sure that it can be done very nicely. I am just not sure that
it is going to save you all that much time if the objective is to have a
nice looking machine.
Mark Hooper
72 TR6
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