It is forever a challenge to get your car right before it goes to paint. And in the case of the car pictured, the builders made an unfortunate mistake.
Look closely in front and behind the rear wheels and you’ll notice that the fender and rocker tips are clipped. These should be a nice fair circular curve. I suspect the fabricator who restored this sheet metal didn’t have reference photos for this piece of the project. Too bad, because so much of the rest of the car looks like it was well thought-out.
Here’s a picture of the correct terminations on the ends of the rocker and rear fender bottom. This is also a problem on the front of the rocker panel on many projects, although not on this particular car.
The owner of the leaf green Sprite has repaired this issue, which meant welding-on extensions and blending the paint. He gets credit for trying to make it right and for helping the rest of us try to find these flaws while the car is in primer, not after the paint has dried.
“Original Sprite” by Horler is a good reference tool if you want to see pictures of what is correct. We also have tons of posts on this site, as well as a concours DVD and digital download, to help people avoid similar mistakes.
