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Had a fun day of fitting and getting a lot accomplished with these pipes. I had to trim the muffler inlets and outlets first thing. Got them cut and the flanges tack welded in place. The mufflers fit really nice so the flanges were welded solid. I'm getting use to new contacts and I am having fun with depth perception, my welds are suffering... I removed the exhaust and finish welded all the connections and flanges. With a little adjustment after it cooled off it was ready to get cleaned up. I used red scotch-brite to remove the discolored areas and give the pipes a uniform look. I did not remove all the surface imperfections so there are some deeper scratches and manufacturing defects in the tube. Using the strip of material like a belt I quickly got it looking better. I picked up a weird little stand from work the other day as they were going to chuck it in the recycle bin (it was a brand new sample from someone) and set it up to help hold the pipes as I finished with the cleaning. It worked fairly well, might have to keep it around for a while. The cleaning took less than an hour total, but looks presentable. I stuck it back under the car, bolted it to the headers and installed the mufflers which are being supported by the stands. Once everything was in its proper position I installed the belly plate, just to see how everything cleared, which it did nicely. Laying on the floor looking up revealed this... So far so good. Now to build some hangers and chop up some tail pipes.

One more thing, most probably there is rust damage to outer wheel well also. When you cut the quarter out, fix the wheel well first as you will have easier access to wheel well through the hole on quarter.

I would cut the rusted area out till I get to good metal first. Then see how much of the patch panel I need. Those patch panels do not have the edges/lines as sharp as the original panels. I found that the complete skins have sharper edges/lines and match to original better even though they are a tad thinner. You can make the edges sharper on the patch panels if you spend some time with hammer and dolly (and some other equipment) or pay a little more and get the bigger quarter panel and cut what you need from that. You will spend a little more $ on a quarter skin but save time and frustration on fixing the edges/lines on that lower patch panel. One other advantage of the quarter skin, you will end up with a bigger left over with a lot of different curves which comes handy to use while fixing other areas like door corners etc.

Drove the stang to the shops today and planned on trouble shooting the gauges when I got home. Got in the car to drive home and they are working again. I have the take the dash out to sort out the GPS tracker that has an issue so I will change the CVR while it's out. I have a spare so worth a try. I love intermittent faults. they're the best!

Went through this a few months ago. I just drilled the head of the rivet and pushed the shank inside. hopefully the shanks will find their way out through the drains on the bottom of the rockers eventually. I do not think you can hear them rattling as they are aluminum and small. I had a few missing clips and missing one side molding, so I used the clips and rivets that came with the repro molding kit. The repro clips worked okay on repro moldings; you have to make sure that the clips are horizontal, if not perfectly horizontal (and parallel to the molding) they do not grab good. Had to turn couple of them a little after I put the molding on. The clip on your photo looks a little worn out, so it may not grab the molding good. On a side note, had to relocate the hole at the back of the molding on one side as it did not align good. Also had to reshape the forward ends of the moldings to match the curvature of the fender and used big washers cut and shaped to fit and hold the front stud on the molding, the studs that came with the molding did not work right.