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July 30, 2020

Finishing the Body Repair

Most of the rust damage on this car was in the lower 5-10 inches of the body.  At this point all of that was pretty much repaired, but there were still a few other things to fix.  As a matter of course, I also wanted to take the rest of the car to bare metal, and get it under a good epoxy primer.

The car had seen more than one minor rear end collision.  I was the cause of one of them decades ago when I backed into the path of a moving car and crunched the left rear corner.  I fixed this at the time, and the repair wasn't too bad if I do say so myself.  There was also evidence of a previous repair to the center rear valance.

One artifact of the earlier damage was a messed up bracket that held the plastic striker for the hatch.  At first, I thought the blind rivets were part of the repair, but some intelligence indicates that they may be the factory fasteners on earlier cars.

 


I decided to just remove the bracket to make repairs easier, and to allow access to the backside for blasting and painting.




Inside the bracket was a little strip of metal with tapped holes for the striker screws.  It was pretty rusted, so it got cleaned up and plated--something the factory apparently didn't think was important.




The threaded plate was supposed to be captive on that little shelf at the top of the bracket, but the top of the bracket had torn loose.  A little MIG action fixed that right up.




After blasting and priming the inside of the valance, the bracket could go back in, but plug welded this time instead of riveted.




To save blasting time, especially in hot weather, I will sometimes strip most of the paint off of a panel with a good methylene chloride stripper.




One last repair to do on the rear is the mounting plate for the left tail light. It was crunched in my accident




Making a new one was pretty simple.




So, that took care of the rear.  There are still some ripples from the accidents, but fixing those will come later.

At some point during this process, I removed the windshield frame.  This makes access to the inside so much easier, especially with the rotisserie.  For much of the interior, I could rotate the body to it's side, and work on it standing up.




Not really much to do behind the dash--just dug out some loose seam sealer, blasted, and primed.




The area above the wheel wells is pretty complex.  I don't know of a better way to get to bare metal than by blasting.  It only took a few minutes per side.




This just left the roof.  The underside was just primer with body color overspray, and some glue for the insulating bats that were in there.  After removing the glue, the primer was in such good shape, I didn't feel like I had to remove all of it.




Pre-stripped the topside and finished it off with a stripping wheel.  This avoided using a blaster on a broad, flatish panel that can be prone to warping.




And finished up the priming.

 


The body tub has taken a couple of months to get this far, but it is now protected from humidity rusting, so I can finish the body work at my leisure.  This stage has been pretty cheap at maybe around $100 for primer.

Comments to Ed at elhollin1@yahoo.com

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