I guess the big news is I decided on someone to finish the body work and paint on the car. While I've had delusions of grandeur of trying to do it all myself, I've realized that given the small amount of time I have to work on the car, plus the fact that body work takes me forever it would take me years to finish the body. The guy I picked works for the City of Tucson in their fleet paint and body shop basically fixing and painting cop car Crown Vics all day. He gets off of work at 2:30 and then goes to work in his small shop until like 7 every night. Seems like a tough life to me, but my impression of him is that he's just a really hard working guy trying to make a better living for his family. His shop is just a one man operation and so one other thing I really liked is that he said I can be involved as much or as little as I want. He's perfectly happy with me coming down there to help block sand or whatever.
I'm pretty excited about it although nervous at the same time. He's basically the type of guy I was looking for because I didn't want to take it to a collision shop where the car would get pushed aside for insurance work. So I was kind of looking for someone who would work on the car on the side. I also wanted someone who was interested/excited about my car. So this guy seemed really excited to work on a car like mine and he was really impressed with the work I've done so far. He kept telling me, "wow, this looks really good, are you sure you've never done body work before?" LOL I told my wife he was just saying that to butter me up.
I'm thinking (hoping) that he's looking at my car as a way to really get his name out there. The other business this guy runs is Speedliner spray on bedliners. Speedliner's can be tinted and sprayed on smooth, so I'm going to go ahead and have him spray the bottom of the car lime green and inside the trunk and the floorboards if there is enough leftover.
I'm taking the car to him next Saturday. So I've been busting my butt trying to get it as ready as possible. First thing I did was go over the floorboards top and bottom. The car got rained on when I brought it home from the chassis shop so I had to clean up all the flash rusting. Plus I cleaned up any welding slag, etc. I then used Metal-2-Metal filler on the roof seam. One lesson learned... I originally did a coat of epoxy primer under the Metal-2-Metal, but it didn't seem to adhere that well to me. I haven't had that problem with regular body filler. So I had to sand all of that out and start over with bare metal. I think the Metal-2-Metal filler must only rely on mechanical adhesion. After I got it really close with the metal filler I then did a light skim coat of regular body filler.
Travis
72 Cuda
