My 72 Rallye Resto

[Pat O']

I've been meaning to get a thread started on my 72 Challenger Rallye. Over on the Body Shop forum, anlauto started an new thread entitled "Todays Lesson" This covered exactly what I am dealing with on my car. Kinda made me chuckle a bit.

I got my Challenger just over a year ago. It's a 72 Rallye with a 340 and an automatic. It was painted in a Plum Crazy color. Over 40 years ago I owned a 72 Challenger Rallye with a 340 and an automatic. That car had a vinyl roof, strobe stripes and lots of chrome. It was B7 Blue.

I purchased the current car with the idea of doing a slight resto mod but visually trying to get very close to what I had back in the 70s.

I'll post a few pictures below of the car when I received it last year.

[anlauto]

Car looks fantastic in those pictures

Can't wait to see the outcome

[jimynick]

Nice car, but kind of a rough looking neighbourhood, eh? 

[Pat O']

I spent the summer going through the car and trying to develop a game plan and budget for the work on the car. Work started in earnest this past November. My brother in law and a good friend of his are experienced body and paint guys and are doing my car on the side. They are letting me help out a bit so I have a bit more into the car than just my hard earned money. I've learned a bit about cutting, chiseling, sanding, grinding and just how filthy dirty I can get in a day.

Once I disassembled the car it was off to the blaster. The car came back looking like this:

 

[Pat O']

Lots of bondo/filler everywhere on the car except for the hood and front fenders which were fairly clean. In the photos we were sanding a good portion of the bondo. Couldn't blast it all out without warping panels. But it was a bit of an eye opener on what was hiding under the paint.

After the rough stuff was cleaned off a bit, the car was rolled into the paint booth for a coat of an etching primer to protect the metal over the next few months.

[Pat O']

My first order of business was the trunk. There was a new panel bonded to the top of the old panel and it looked real suspicious. This was were my project "budget" started to look a bit optimistic. I'm sure most everyone is faced with that a some point on these cars.

I had a separate thread going on the "Body Shop" board titled "Trunk Sandwich". I detailed what went on getting the rear of the car back together on that thread so I won't cover that again here. Going forward I'll post the rest of my project restoration on this thread. We are real happy with how the trunk came together. the AMD panels all went in with a minimum of sweat and hammering.

After the original sheet metal was out of the way we got a good look at the rear quarters behind the wheels. This is what it looked like.

[Pat O']

The areas behind the rear wheels had been hacked back together. Looks like someone had cut away the rusted areas and then bonded on and shaped some sheet metal directly over the old metal. We dug out bondo in these areas that was almost a half inch thick in a couple of places. I got some patch panels and with a little work we determined a good point for a splice.

[Pat O']

This picture turned into the beginning of a small night mare.

[Pat O']

The previous picture showed a split in the sheet meal of the rocker. This was on both sides of the car, pretty much in the middle of the door opening. We had a number of other people look this over as we were working on the car and pretty much came to the conclusion that I was the proud owner of 2 cars! Or more accurately parts of two cars. After about a half and hour we could see that a front section was welded to the rear section of another car. The seam was at the original A pillar / roof splice and through the middle of the rocker panels and a little fancy cutting/splicing around the floor plan.

This caused a great deal of concern. A close inspection of the welds indicated that the rockers were butt welded together. The car was flexing and causing the split in the metal depicted in the previous picture. Really not a safe situation.  I don't have any pictures  yet, but what we did was purchase new inner and outer rockers for both sides and cut out several inches on each side of the splice. That metal was then cut and shaped to the inside of the remaining rocker and new metal spliced into the gap. This essentially creates a solid metal sleeve inside the rocker panel that overlaps in both directions from the new welds. As and added measure I purchased the Car tools subframe connectors and we'll be installing those for an added measure of safety and chassis stiffing. I'll get some more pictures of that work, hopefully in a few days.

[daaboots]

Two cars spliced together 

It looked so good in the first pictures though.

[Pat O']

I have a few pictures of the inside of the splice. They are only cell phone pics so they are not very good. Also a picture of the completed splice. I'm glad we got this repair out of the way. Should be the last of any metal replacement/repair on the body.

[Super Blue 72]

Wow!  The front section was from one car and the rear section from another car? 

Your car looked so nice in the first pics! 

[Pat O']

Boy! back on again after 20 months.  Last post in March of 2015.  Work came to a stop on my car. My brother in law and his friend seemed to loose interest in the car. No work was getting done and I think they were fighting between themselves over who wasn't doing their part. They started intimating that they needed more money, again. Shortcuts were taken, new bondo over old bondo and bondo a quarter inch thick slathered on. By June of 2015 I said enough. Bring it back to me, now, no arguments and we won't get an attorney involved.

Got the car back and started looking for a new shop.  No one would price it because they couldn't see what was going on underneath. After about 3 discussions, I got my mind wrapped around the fact that I was going to have to strip the car down to bare metal. Manually. I had it blasted once and I worried about getting the metal too thin.

Worked on the roof first and this confirmed my suspicions. In the pic below you can see a rust spot where a patch of bondo used to be.

[Pat O']

After much work with a bunch of sweat, sore muscles and a fair amount of cursing I arrived at a clean car.  I really have to say I was happy. I've seen others on these boards talk about the satisfaction of knowing every inch of their car after they've sanded it down to metal.  I did a lot of sanding and used paint stripper in some areas. After I was done, I knew exactly were the problems were and what needed to be fixed.

A couple of pics of the bare car:

[anlauto]

Wow...I hear this story way too often.....I feel for you man