If bodywork is considered intimidating to the average car crafter, then quarter-panel replacement is probably cause for a full-on anxiety attack. Sure, most of us are willing to bolt on a new fender or door, and we might even attempt to straighten wrinkles in the sheetmetal, but grafting in a full quarter-panel is more than most of us will even think about tackling ourselves. And for good reason-the quarter-panels of most '60s- and '70s-era cars are an integral part of the car's body, not intended to be quickly swapped. The relatively large number of attachment points mandates an equal amount of critical alignment adjustments that can make or break the final fit-and-finish of the vehicle. To add to the pressure, once the original quarter is removed, there's usually no turning back.
Of course, there hasn't really been a need to even ponder this job in years, since for most muscle-era cars, full factory-style quarter-panels haven't been available, save for caches of NOS sheetmetal, which often carry a steep tariff. Our Camaro posed a dilemma: Being a base sport coupe, it didn't seem valuable enough to merit the expense of NOS quarters, yet patch panels wouldn't have cured all of the rust. But just as we had resigned ourselves to take what seemed like the only reasonable option by using partial quarters and patches, the aftermarket stepped up with an alternative.
Goodmark Industries offers an extensive line of replacement sheetmetal for classic cars and trucks, and recently added full OE-style rear quarter-panels for '69 Camaros to its voluminous catalog. Brand-new tooling was commissioned expressly by Goodmark to create these panels, which are intended to replicate the replacements previously offered by GM in both fit and finish, allowing restorers not to simply fix their Camaros cosmetically, but to actually return them to their original state, with no additional seams or splices. Goodmark also offers the inner and outer wheelhouses along with trunk-floor extensions, which are all likely to be damaged on vehicles exhibiting outer-body rot to the quarter-panels.
But obtaining the panels was only half the battle-we still had to find someone who could get them on the car, preferably in the same manner used by assembly line workers the first time around. After speaking with several shops that wanted to trim the full quarters down to splice them together with remnants of the original steel, we contacted Sal Perez at American Muscle Cars in Santee, California. Despite being a California native based in one of the mildest climates in the country, Perez is well versed in rust repair, having restored cars from all over the U.S. Although, as the name implies, American Muscle Cars works on all forms of Detroit classics, we were pleasantly surprised to find that first-gen Camaros are a specialty. In fact, Perez and his crew claim to have done the rear quarters on over 30 early F-cars, and now consider the job routine. Perez says that his shop only uses full quarters these days, and that they'll only install them at the factory seams-just what we wanted to hear.
American Muscle Cars body tech Orlando Hernandez handled most of the work on our Camaro and made it look easy, though we would still caution the uninitiated on attempting this job alone. If you have no experience in this field, use this article as a guide to assist you in contracting a shop to do the work. If you've cut open a few cars, maybe you're ready to try quarter replacement. Either way, you'll see that even a fairly weather-beaten classic can be truly returned to factory specs using the parts available from Goodmark.
