Great work

Thanks

The body is totally stripped and ready to be removed. I'm going to make some bracing for the door opening and figure out some decent attaching points to lift it with a cherry picker.

For now I'm working getting all the other panels stripped, body worked and in primer.

It is amazing how much work goes into properly restoring a vehicle.
Keep up the good work.

'68 Coronet R/T wrote:It is amazing how much work goes into properly restoring a vehicle.
Keep up the good work.

Isn't that the truth. You hear a lot of people selling their desirable but beat up cars saying it's worth 50K restored, without appreciating how much work and money it takes to restore it. Thanks for the support.

I'm working on the rear fenders, I need to cut out the old, failed caged nuts and replace them before I do anything else on them.

Replacing the caged nuts went a lot more smoothly than expected. Cutting and grinding the old ones out took the bulk of the work. I bought this Miller spot welder years ago for a great price figuring I'd need it eventually. I cannot say enough good things about it. Pinch the metal together and pull the trigger and you're done. To try and rosette weld it under the flange would have been a real pain.

rjuhasz wrote:...I picked up this stripping tool. I'm pretty impressed with it, only took about 15 minutes to strip the top side of the trunk.

Which wheel did you end up with? I have been on their site looking at that tool a few times and they seem to have a few different style of wheels in the same grit.

Great project BTW!! I admire you guys (in a petty jealous way!) that can dig into a car that deep.

It comes with a 120 grit but I also ordered the black 60 grit and that's what I used. The 120 probably works fine but the 60 is faster. It's pretty effortless, just the weight of the tool on the surface is all you need.


Oops, just noticed it's 40 grit. I'm sure 60 grit would be pretty much the same

Note to self, strip panels completely before doing anything else. The left rear fender is a disaster, I was knee deep in filler dust when I gave up. I have a friend that restores British cars and luckily he had a good used one that I was able to get. It has some minor dings that will be easy to fix. He doesn't have one for the other side so I hope mine is a lot nicer than this side was.

I stripped the outside, still need to do the inside of it.

Worked out the little dings and did a bit of welding on the flange. Had to torch out some pretty thick lead on the top back corner where the tail light goes. No idea why they would have lead there? I assume there will be a fit issue without the close to 1/4" of lead. I'll figure that out later.

After looking more closely at the original caged nuts I figured I should prefit the rear fender before spot welding the nuts in. Good thing because they weren't centered and the repop caged nuts have at most a 1/16" movement, the originals have about a 1/4".

It's skin coated with filler and ready for epoxy primer and then polyester primer

I pulled the body off this morning, couldn't have gone any better. I built a body cart to put it on. I've heard two people can lift it off, probably true as long as I'm not one of them. I made some door braces and a harness of sorts to hang from the cherry picker. I wanted it to pull straight up to reduce any extra stress on the sheet metal.