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Once home, we wanted to do as much work as possible before taking the car to the body shop. Such things as removal of seats and old upholstery side panels. Store this stuff carefully - don't throw anything away. You will be surprised what you will need later.
A friend was a body/fender man and he helped replace the floor and rocker panels. I did the "grunt" work and he did the skilled work - a great way to learn. This proved to be a real education. It also called for a whole bunch of new tools, including compressor, air hammer, nibbler, grinder and so forth. It was here that I fell under the spell of the old saying "He who dies with the most tools, wins!" I now have at least twice the number of tools that I had at the beginning of the project. - Bill
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A close look here will show the condition of the rocker panels as well as the size of the chunks as they were cut out of the floor. This floor had to be cut out from just forward of the rear seat clips to the first solid metal where the floor meets the firewall. Note that the drive-line tunnel was left intact. That gave us enough of the old floor to weld to so that the original countours could be kept. Some of the tools used are shown.
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The first real sense of accomplishment! The floor is out and the rocker panels are still in place to keep things tied together. After the new floor is welded in place, the rocker panels can be cut out and replaced.
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After the floor is in, the rocker panels can go in. Grind down the rough edges and then a bit of bondo will clean up the seams just fine. Note the clutch/brake service panel - bought from R/Car. We had the option of purchasing only the lower half & welding them together. If we had to do it again, we would probably get just the lower half.
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Once the rocker panels are in, a generous application of seam-seal (both on top and under the floor) will assure a watertight floor. Follow that with a prime coat just to keep the work area clean - a great psychological boost for the restorer.
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Also, if you are planning to remove your dash for painting or having it woodgrained, this would be a good time to remove it - we didn't and learned the hard way - read on.
The next thing we did was to remove all the sheet metal forward of the firewall, the rear fenders, the trunk deck. This entailed removing the radiator, bumpers, heater - essentially stripping the car down to the basic body plus the engine.
After that, we took everthing except the body, frame, engine & wheels to the sandblaster. Be careful that the sandblaster does not to let the heat build up in your metal and warp your body panels. We were VERY fortunate to have someone who understood that problem and avoided it.
We next also acquired a small blaster (too small, really) to use on the remaining body of the car. This is where we made a mistake! We waited until later to take out the dash and ended up with sand everywhere up behind it and into the instruments. We also forgot to remove ALL of the headliner material and the visors. You guessed it - sand got absolutely everywhere and was a huge mess to clean up later. Blowing it out with an air hose is surprisingly inefficient - you have to keep on doing it time after time as you proceed with your restoration.
To answer an obvious question - NO, we did not take the body off the frame and sandblast the frame and the underside of the body. This was another mistake although the underside of the body was in pretty fair shape as were the body mounts. Next time, I would go the extra step and improve the overall quality of the restoration. It would have added a couple hundred dollars more to the cost, but I think it would be worth it.
If you want to save your windshield and other glass, don't get a sandblaster near it. The flat glass in our car was weather-scratched pretty badly so we just let it get blasted when we worked around it. We did, however, cut the rubber and trmove the rear window, carefully wrapping it up and storing it in a safe place until later. Good curved rear window glass is hard to find.
Lessons learned the hard way: In doing your own sandblasting - the sand will get everywhere and, if you have to do it on a driveway or in a garage, take care to confine it or it will drift into things you don't want contaminated. It is heavy and hard to dispose of. Don't put it on your lawn or in a flowerbed - it won't sustain plant growth! I ended up putting it in the garbage, about 20 pounds at a time until it was all gone.
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