Main Body about Done

 I finally have the quarter panels and roof all smoothed out with first phase of the paint prep.  This phase fixes rust, major dents, and removes all old paint.  All I have to do now is spray on a couple coats of epoxy primer.  Yeh, this was a major effort.  The two quarters I knew about the dents in them because I could see the body filler that had been applied.  I removed all that and applied new filler and got them all smoothed out.  I swear this car was used in some sort of racing where contact was allowed because there were a lot of dents.  If I had of know there were as many as there were I may have tried to replace them but its too late now and they do look pretty good now.

The roof had similar problems that I didn't notice until I started removing the paint and feeling the bumps and dents.  It appears the car had rolled over in this race or whatever they were doing with it and the dents were never addressed.  They all appear to be smoothed out pretty good now and I don't see any rust that went through so I'm actually real happy about the condition of the roof.

This pic was taken just after the body filler was applied and before sanding.  I don't have a pic of the completed job but you can get the idea of what was done.  Both drivers and passenger sides.

Its too cold to put the primer on now but its supposed to be in the 60's this weekend again so I will do it them.  Wish my Mexican was here to help.  I'm going to be applied two coats of black primer to the main body of the car from the tail to the cowl panel, them also to the top of the trunk cover as that is ready to go also.  I also have the door hinged sand blasted and ready to prime and will also try to do the hood hinges.

Once the paint is dry I will mock up the trunk and see if it still fits.  This weekend I realized I had the quarter panel extensions to do that I forgot about.  If you remember one of them was damaged beyond repair but I found a used on on EBay.  I spent some time with it today and made the adjustments to get it to fit right so maybe I will try to strip those and add them to the primer day project then the car will be in primer from the tail to the cowl less the two doors.

The doors are this weeks project according to the schedule.  I went over and got them out of storage today to get ready to start that while the weather is cold and I can't paint.  There appears to be no damage to the doors so I just need to strip them and prime them...I hope.  That will only take about a day, two at the most so if I can accomplish that and if I can get the priming done this coming weekend then I will be back on my schedule.

If all goes well the entire car will be reassembled and epoxied by the end of February, then I allowed 4 weeks to finish the paint prep which consisted of painting the entire car with high build grey primer and block sanding the entire car.  This process gets repeated as many times as required to get all the smaller dents out.  They actually get filled and leveled off with the primer paint and the surface is smooth as glass when done.

I don't think this will take 4 weeks based upon what I am seeing in the sanding work so far.  I believe I'm doing a good job getting most of the low spots fixed so I'm hoping only having to spray the high build once or twice and the second time maybe not the entire car.  Then I'll be way ahead of schedule.

This is what the doors currently look like.  I can see from the pic I have to grind off the trip studs for the lower trim piece because Lee doesn't want the trim, but thats pretty easy.  

As an aside, we had to move out of out storage facility today because they have been raising the price every 6 months on us and now its over $300 per month.  I found another place that is about 3 miles away so not as convenient but they are having a sale and selling a larger unit for $120 per month.  So we rented that.  And to stop the price increases we were able to pay in advance for that same rate as far ahead as we wanted.  So we paid upfront for two years and will save almost $200 per month for a larger unit.  I'm happy.  I'ts a little farther away but I don't go over there that ofter anymore so its not a problem and if we move out before 2 years we get refunded.