68 Firebird part 1

New project, a 68 Pontiac Firebird owned by a friend. Oh, this is not it. This is our inspiration photo.

This is the car we will be doing. It looks real straight at first. Just a couple of rust holes and dents.

A little body work and then paint. This is going to be easy.

First thing to do is remove the rear bumper and wheel trim. It was going well until I got to one unyielding bumper bolt inside the trunk. Cant just torch it since its near the gas tank. Finally got it out after about an hour, but I had to cut part of the brace out to do it (we'll fix that later).

I started here. A little rust bubbling, how bad could it be?

I banged on it with my fist, this much came out.

With just a little metal cutting, the hole got this big. Wow.

Here I am pointing to the filler I had to grind out. This car has had work before. No matter, but the filler was at least 3/8" thick! Waaaay too much.

I had to cut out this much to get to firm metal.

Heres the edge of the rear pan. Total junky bodywork. We'll have to fix this later.

I got bitchin' patch panels already. To trim them I use this pneumatic shear. Theres no way these will cut with any hand snips.

Heres another look at the rear pan area. Yes the filler was this thick. To his credit, the previous bodyman did have this all shaped to look like a decent 68 Firebird. He was a real sculpting artist. I figure the entire car will be 3/8" smaller in all directions when I get done with it!

Here is the panel clamped in place. Fitting panels is very fussy and takes a long time to get right. The sheetmetal screws are just temporary. They will be removed and the holes welded up. Time to weld it in.

Here we are after filler (sorry for the fuzzy photo). Nowhere on this panel is the filler more than 1/16". If you do your metal work right, you only need a thin coat of filler. It does usually take a couple of coats of filler though, to get a panel dead straight. This is the correct way.

Top tip: To sand convex surfaces, I use pieces of rubber car tubing with the paper wrapped around it. This gives you a curved surface, and the rubber hose is squishy; it confirms as you sand.

Quick quiz: How much filler do you sand off? Thats right class, almost all of it! There should only be enough filler to smooth over the transitions and fill gentle low spots. If you need more than 1/16", your metal work sucks. Go back and fix it, sanding filler takes just as long as fixing panels, so there no time saving in slopping on the filler.

So here it is: one replacement panel, rust removed, primed, with a minimum of filler. Nice.