It's hard to believe, but I'm out of aluminum panels, unless the VIN plate is considered a panel. I'll install that once my title arrives.

My last two panels to install were the door sill plates. They're powder coated to match the dash and trans cover. Instead of installing carpet on the sill, I picked up a remnant stick of angled aluminum (1"x1/2"x1/8") from my local metal supplier. Man, I love that place. They always have exactly what I need, and inexpensive. It's become one of my favorite places to shop.

Here are the DS sill edge pieces cut, drilled, and prepped for powder coat. They fit just fine in my little PC oven.




Well, I did my best to cut the aluminum ends to match the slope of the door sill chassis tubes. My goal was no gap between the pieces, but here you can see I fell a bit short between the longer two sections on the DS. Oh, well. My build has never been at risk of becoming a show car, so why start now? A theme of stainless fasteners contrasted against dark powder coat (dash, trans cover, etc.) emerged earlier in my build. I liked it, so just continued throughout the build. These rivets are not stainless, but have the same effect to my eyes.




My battle with the DS rear wheel spacer is now in Round 3. I installed this 1/2" spacer because a 1" spacer caused the tire to rub even during minor suspension travel. The body also happens to sit lower on the DS, so double whammy between (1) the shorter wheel well lip and (2) lower body height. As I noted previously, the DS wheel well lip extends from the chassis about 5/16" less than the PS. (The 1 inch spacer on the PS is working well).



The 1/2" spacer made a big difference, but I'm still not out of the woods. The tire still rubs, but only during extensive suspension travel (i.e. big dips in the road). I would like to keep the 1/2" spacer, so will probably trim the wheel well lip (on both sides to match). This was going to be left for the body/paint pro, but I need clearance on the DS now.

While I was looking for a 1/2" spacer (bought the one above from Speedway), I stumbled across extended thread lug nuts. Who knew? Apparently, designed for situations like adding wheel spacers. (I wasn't looking forward to removing the studs from the hub). In my case, these lug nuts provide about 0.05 inches less (1.3 mm) of thread engagement (0.62" v. 0.67") as compared to the original lug nuts without spacers.

In between all of the above I spent time on a dyno with a tuner. Looking forward to getting my dyno chart emailed over from the tuner. I'll post the results.

Happy building!