355Fiero, Linlor, or just plain ol' Don... whatever screen name you know him by, Don Ostergard's a saint. In about 2002, Don purchased one of IFG's second generation F355 body kits and spent 8 years cutting it apart, straightening and modifying it, and breathing in countless hours of fibreglass dust and resin fumes to make it better. Then he ran out of steam.
Through one of the Fiero forums we both were participating in, Don saw that I had embarked on the same journey, and whether through sympathy, or a resin-fume-impaired-decision (or a combination of both) he offered his IFG body kit to me. I'm forever grateful to him as his work saved me many hundreds of hours of work and potentially even saved my car from becoming yet another statistic in the long list of unfinished kit cars.
The best way for me to thank him is to highlight the work he did to the raw IFG kit. These next few posts demonstrate the level of commitment required to build a typical "kit car" (don't you put those together in a weekend?). I apologize in advance for the quality of some photos, many of them are Don's and the state of digital photography 15 years ago wasn't what it is today.
Starting with the rear, here's what the virgin IFG 2nd generation rear quarters looked like:
Notice the rear window and rear quarter window frames being much closer to the OEM Ferrari contours. Several things they didn't fix were the fender arches being tilted inward towards the top, the arch being much too high, and the Coke-bottle curves when viewed from the top. Don took care of these three things with one fell swoop by splitting the heck out of it and realigning the pieces:
Dropping the fender arches 25 mm was a big deal since it involved re-contouring the entire fender. It was also the last of many steps I described in post #29 to bring the fender-to-wheel-gaps down to a respectable 51 mm. Here's the final clearance compared with the 6-3/8" I initially started with:
Next up, Don cut the Berlinetta roof and sail panels off and moulded the tonneau cover wells and lower-profile sail panels for his convertible:
Then he addressed the bowed upper and lower rear fascia lines:
The top line was easy... a simple skim of additional fibreglass and some body filler was all that was needed. The lower line was much more involved since it not only had to be dropped below the thickness of the fibreglass, it was also badly warped fore and aft. So Don physically cut out most of the lower bumper cover, and fabricated a new wooden mould...
...and re-glassed the entire lower portion. He also took the opportunity to relocate the exhaust outlets to the proper location, and mould in the 8 oval vent holes:
The result was well worth the effort:
At this point, he was only just getting started on the rear end mods. He then fabricated new tail light panel moulds to fix a problem with their alignment:
And then decided the door jambs weren't to his liking either. The original IFG door jambs were formed by a simple 90 degree turn in from the outer quarter panel skin toward the cabin:
The trailing edge of the doors were also originally made the same way, which would have made it impossible to mount an outer door seal, and would have required a lot of massaging to get an even door gap. A far better solution was to peel back the outer skin from the perimeter of the door jamb making a step-like feature:
The trailing edge of the door skin was then lengthened an equal amount to form a labyrinthine passageway between the door and the jamb. The result was that an outer seal could now be worked out, and the final shaping of the door gap would be a simple matter of trimming and shaping the rear edge of the door skin rather than the entire surfaces of the jamb and the door:
The last modification Don made to the rear quarters was to chop off the rocker panel. His plan was to separate all three pieces of the rocker panels from the lower front fender, door, and rear quarter, and mold them into a single piece like the authentic F355. He then created fibreglass flanges on the quarter panels to be able to bolt the one-piece rockers back on:
When it came time for me to test fit Don's rear quarters to my frame, I needed to make one major change. Since my car will be a Berlinetta, I needed to remove his tonneau cover wells to clear my metal C-pillars:
And with that, I was able to mock up the rear quarters on my chassis at Dave's Collision: