Denis' Chevy II Bodywork - Page 3
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Another common rust area is the rear window. The problem here was some bubbling under the rear window. John explained to me the problem with this. He was stating that the rear window will have to come out. The good news was that we could cut out the old panel and get one from John Golden at J&M Auto. John Golden set me up with a repro panel from either Sherman or Goodmark.
The picture on the left shows a chip of bondo and paint that came off from the bubbling in the seam. The picture really does not show how bad it realy was, but I can tell you that the last hacker here must have bought a few gallons of bondo. The bondo covered the whole rear panel and was about 1/4 inch thick. The seams were filled in and the tops of the quarter panels were blended in with the filler to "hide" the "fix".
John and I removed the rear stainless steel trim and the rear window. Once the window was out, the truth was told. The old panel was really rusted. Another suprised emerged when we started to dig in. John noticed the car had been painted twice before. The car was originally white with a fawn interior. Someone painted it red. Later in it's hard life, someone else painted the body green, as shown in the photo's. The layers of paint were tremendous. The only way to do it correctly was to strip the body down to bare metal.
Once we carefully measured and cut the old panel out, I started to ask myself what we were doing. This was the first body that I witnessed and attempted to restore. John, on the otherhand, had plenty of experience. He reassured me, more than once, that it would come out fine.
John was right. Although this photo does not show the details that well, you can trust me when I tell you that the new panel looked really good. John, from J&M Auto does know his parts. The panel fit in without any hassle. We ground down and sandblasted the top of the quarters and removed all of the body filler. The sandblasting ensured that there was no more rust pits left in the seam and joints of the quarter panel. The new panel droped in. A little time was needed to make the alignment, and we welded it in.
The seams were finished off by leading in the joints. John has been around the body business for a while. He uses lead on jobs like this. He explained to me that the factory used lead on a lot of the joints. Lead wouldn't rust, so it's great added insurance. Obviously it is toxic, so great care was taken to make sure we were safe.
After the leading, John shot a self-ecthing primer over the new panel. It was good to witness the amount of work he put in the car. I knew I was in good hands with him. He was doing an awesome job.
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The rear quarters are ground down with the dual action sander. These pictures do not show the later problem we found. The lower half of the rear quarters, behind the tires, we found that the prevoius person filled the bottoms of the quaters with bondo. I started to ask myself, what wasn't filled with bondo?
When I started to cut away at the bottoms of the quarters, I found something interesting. The previous guy oiled up some rags and stuffed them down the inside of the trunk to slow the rust from coming back. I guess this was his attempt to stop the rust. This is just a thought, but he should have just fixed it right. It wouldn't come back so quickly that way.
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I took the doors off the car to do the floors. I was much easir to work this way. I also stripped the doors down so that there was no glass, trim or hardware in them. We stripped the paint off and edged the jams. John finessed the doors to weld up the hole left by the side mouldings and took out all of the door dings. We hung the doors in the paintbooth shot the paint on them when they were ready.
The trunk lid was removed early on to accomidate the repair of the back window panel. We stripped down the layers of paint and made sure that there was no rust. It looked pretty good and needed very little to make it perfect.
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