Happy Thanksgiving to all! Today I can say that I am thankful for the fact that I now, once again, have one complete body. The butt transplant (as I've dubbed it) turned out to be quite a process. Once I got it in place, there was a lot of shifting, grinding, measuring, trimming, and remeasuring, until I got everything lined up. The two bodies weren't the perfect match I had visions of. 45+ years of twisting made it a challenge. It took about a day and a half just to get it tacked into place and another day to get the first welds on the pillars. Today I finished up the floor and the initial welding on the pillars. It's not pretty, but tomorrow I should be grinding and cleaning them up.
A bit of redneck engineering to coax the floors to line up. The front portion had a bit of a dent, while the rear seemed to pulled itself up after I cut it out of the original body.
Here's the "Band-Aid" for the floor.
And the pillars
Caught my father-in-law sneaking around for an inspection in the last photo. I'm anxious to get started on the grinding tomorrow so I can really judge how well it came out.