67 Panel Project Page 10

While we were at stripping paint and doing the body work, we decided to do another one of the several modifications that we want to do to it. We decided it would be cool to add an electric antenna to our Panel. We know that there are some nice under dash antennas available, but thought that this would be a nice touch. After looking at several different antennas we found that most of them were too large, and would cause us to have to do customizing than we were willing to do. When we started work on this we knew it would be a “Rodstoration” and not a “Restoration”, but we wanted all of our customizations to be subtle. Then we found a mini antenna. This one has a mast that is only 15″ tall and once installed, will not have some bulky box that you have to figure out how to hide.

We wanted to mount the antenna as close to the stock location as possible, but before we could do that we had to modify the body to accept it. We did that by first measuring the antenna, and then cutting out the section of firewall that we figured we needed to cut. We made sure to cut out small, because you can remove more metal easier than you can replace it when you cut out too much. The left picture shows what we had to cut out, and the right picture shows fitting the sheet metal to build the area for the antenna. Note, you can see in the right picture that we did wind up cutting out some of the vent housing. This is alright, because we wanted to shave the vent on the passenger side anyway. That will allow less outside air to get inside the Panel once it is done, making it easier for the future A/C system to cool the interior.

The picture below on the left is the completed box fitted in the area we created for it, and the picture on the right is it welded in.

The next two pictures are of the vent. The one on the left shows how much of the box cut into it and the one on the right shows fitting the patch we made to conceal the box.