The new patch panel was then tack-welded to our donor panel. After doing this, all of the material above the patch panel was trimmed away. Again, keep in mind there's a lot of measuring going on in between these steps.

The new assembly was then put in place and held with a few sets of locking pliers.

With the panel in place, it was then tack-welded to the Camaro. You can also get a good look at where we cut the forward edge of the quarter panel.

Tack welds along the perimeter of the wheel lip further secured the new panel to the quarter. Most of this will later be trimmed away.

Pulling the quarter out leaves gaps in other spots that need to be patched. Here you can see how the area just behind the doorjamb was expertly filled in by Valdovinos. Later it will be fully welded and ground smooth.

To keep the wheel opening lip radius looking right, it needed to be sliced, slightly moved, and patched in. We warned you this wasn't easy. Pulling the lip out does move it up just a touch, but not enough to worry about.

Besides giving the Camaro a cool look, our goal is to run a 315 tire without mini-tubbing the car. We didn't have a 315/30/18 tire handy, so we tossed in this 325/30/19...

...It barely fit and helped us get an idea of how the panel stretch will give the Track Rat a more aggressive look. We ended up with just over 14 inches of space between the...

...center top of the wheel lip and the inside of the wheelhouse. Imagine how big of a tire we could run if we did a mini-tub as well!

Another tricky area to patch is where the quarter panel meets the rear panel. Scrap steel closed off the gap, and another section of our donor panel from NPD was used to get the corner area looking right.

More patching was done inside the wheel tub. Once all the welding is done, everything ground down, and then undercoated, it will look like it came this way. In addition to the extra depth of the wheel tub from the stretch, we also gained space for the tire to compress into during hard turns.

Here you can see how we handled the area between the bottom of the quarter panel and the trunk drop-off panel. When the car is on the ground it's not visible unless you're crawling around on the asphalt, and if you're doing that, you have issues.

To give the quarter-panel lip even more strength, Valdovinos welded in a 3/16-inch bar of steel along the perimeter. This also allows us run a very tight-rolled lip for even more tire clearance.

JCG Restorations has done this stretch before on '69 Camaros, and it turns out it was quite a bit easier. One example of this was in the area of the rear bumper. On a '69, the stock bumper bolted right up, but not on our '68.

The easy fix was to make two cuts in the corner of the bumper and just pull it out a bit. Note that the slots Valdovinos cut are offset so that the bumper maintained its shape. Once in just the right place, the cuts were welded up and ground smooth.

Here you can see the before and after shots of the rear quarter. It's hard to capture all the 3-D coolness in a 2-D image, but the transformation is enough to be noticed, but not to the point of overpowering the rest of the car. Of course, the real test will be when we get the body painted and slammed down on the appropriate rollers...

...Also, in true gearhead fashion, we are already looking at ways to give the front fenders the same treatment, maybe just an inch to balance out the widebody look in the rear. For now we need to get the body back over to Best Of Show Coach Works and closer to the paint booth.