No plans to rest on July 4th. Four days off, four days of work. While the rest of the country lights fireworks, I'll be in a party tent with a spotweld removal tool and a marker pen covered in inch-to-metric conversions. Everyone celebrates differently.

The A-pillars have been hanging over this build since Episode 5. Rusted through on the driver side, questionable on the passenger side, and every week I didn't deal with them was another week the car couldn't move forward. Today, they come out.

The idea was surgery, not demolition. If I could remove just the external shell of each A-pillar while keeping the internal metal intact, the replacement would be simpler: less cutting, less measurement, less chance of the whole structure shifting out of alignment. Spotweld removal tool, air hammer, cutting discs, and one of those sanding disc things whose proper name I've never learned. Careful work. Slow work. The kind of work where you stop every few minutes to check you haven't gone too far.

The first pillar came off and it didn't look promising. Surface rust everywhere, the sort of colour that makes you assume the worst. I grabbed a brush disc and cleaned it back.

The metal underneath was shiny. Solid. Healthy.

YAHOO.

Three episodes of worrying about these pillars, and the internal structure is fine. Both sides. I could have cried, but there were spiders watching and I have a reputation to maintain.

The passenger side went first. Careful, measured, slow. The second A-pillar, thanks to everything I'd learned on the first, went considerably faster. Boom, boom, done. Same tools, same technique, half the time. There's something deeply satisfying about doing a thing twice and being noticeably less terrible at it the second time.

With both external shells removed, the top brace had to go as well. I lifted it off gently and set the new Dynacorn piece on top. The passenger side foundation was slightly worse than the driver side, which is the kind of inconsistency that keeps you humble. I cleaned both surfaces thoroughly and applied anti-corrosion treatment before anything gets welded. Clean metal now means healthy metal later. A few bolts screwed in loosely to keep everything from wandering overnight.

While I had the momentum, I cleaned out the rear wheel wells completely. They'd rusted to the point where finding the original spot welds was like archaeology: scrub, squint, guess, drill. The back decklid still needs attention, and the whole tent looks like a bomb went off, but cleaning up can wait. Forward motion matters more than tidiness right now.

That evening, after the light was gone and the tent became useless, I brought the inner structural parts inside. To my home office. Because that's a normal thing to do.

I laid out the driver and passenger side assemblies and started bolting them together. Got the first side wrong immediately: the top right piece goes under the long section, not over. The holes lined up either way, which is the kind of false confidence that leads to problems six episodes from now. Fixed it, moved on.

And then I tried the ClickOns.

I need to say this clearly: cleco fasteners are the single best tool I've used on this build. Absolute must. A hundred times better than bolts for temporary assembly. They grip, they hold, they release cleanly, and they let you position panels with the kind of accuracy that bolts simply can't match. If you're doing a conversion and you don't have these, stop reading and go order some. I'll wait.

I assembled the wheel wells, connected the structural sections, and by the end of the evening had both inner assemblies ready to drop into the car the next morning.

Morning. Spider eviction. Two of them had set up camp under the wooden planks near the tent. Relocated, not killed. I'm destroying a car, not an ecosystem.

Then I sat down and re-watched Scott Harness, Lost Socket Garage, and a few others, writing down their measurements. Triple-checking. This is the phase where accuracy matters more than speed, because the inner structure defines every panel that goes on top of it. Get this wrong and nothing downstream will fit. Get this right and everything clicks.

Then I realised I had a problem. All the reference videos use inches. I grew up on metric. I can think in millimetres without effort, but sixty-fourths of an inch make my brain itch. So I did the reasonable thing: grabbed a marker and scratched a conversion chart directly onto the side of the car.

It's not pretty. It's not going to be in the final build. But for the next few weeks, every time I reach for a tape measure, the cheat sheet is right there on the quarter panel. Practical beats elegant.

By the end of day four, all the inner structural parts were roughly dropped into the car. Not welded. Not measured to final spec. But sitting in place, loosely assembled, giving me the first real look at the whole picture since I started cutting. The skeleton is there. The bones are in the right places. Tomorrow I'll measure everything properly and, if the numbers check out, start welding the inner structure together, left and right side individually, the way Lost Socket Garage does it.

There's still a chrome piece on the rear that I can't figure out how to remove. The nuts are hidden underneath and it's all too tight. I'll sort it. There's also the spot welder, still untested, still waiting for its moment on the spare door skin. And the B-pillar connection to the central top section needs a closer look.

But the A-pillars are solved. The internal metal is solid. The new Dynacorn shells are ready. The inner structure is assembled. And I spent July 4th exactly the way I wanted to: outside, covered in rust dust, building something.

Happy Fourth. Keep you posted.