The body of my car is in pretty decent shape as far as rust goes. The driver's side floor is the only floor panel that needed to be replaced, due to rust through. A new repro floor panel came with the car, and has been installed.
Body shell removed from frame. Note bare frame below...
Driver's side floor pan almost ready to weld.
All welded in and partially ground. This took about 4 hours of trimming and fitting!
Under the driver's seat brace. The area in the top of the picture is where I've stripped the old undercoat off.
Lower rear of Pax door need repair!
This is what I found when stripping the pax rocker! As I went, I kept wondering WHY there was over 1/8" of Bondo on the thing..........
This is the only damage on the whole rocker!
Pax rocker is pretty clean
The quarter panel is not too bad, but I think that the lower portions will be replaced with patch panels. I'll see what the body shop says....... Second picture from the left was the only real surprise under all that Bondo! It's like an archaeological dig!
All pics of the pax rear wheel well, before and during repair.
I am in the process of removing the 35 y.o. factory undercoating, so I can repair and repaint the underbody. This stuff is really tough! The up side is that the rustproofed parts are solid and rust free. Well, I found a way to remove the undercoating! HEAT! When heated with a propane torch, the stuff scrapes off like butter!
Update: While I was attempting to patch the trunk floor, I found that a previous owner had used rust converter on it. There were many pinholes and a few larger holes, so I started to patch them with my MIG welder. After spending a LOT of time making a patch panel for a thin spot in the center area, I had a lot of trouble welding it in. After completely removing a lot of metal, along with the rust converted areas with a 60 grit flapper wheel, the metal was a bit too thin, so I decided to replace the entire trunk, including the body and gas tank braces. I will post some pictures soon. I have most of the old floor out, and the body prepped for the new panels.
Old trunk floor after removal.
New trunk pans being installed. I have about 20 hours in this project at this point!
The body shop guys decided that removing the hundreds of pounds of undercoating manually wasn't a good idea, so the body was sent up to Revivation in Wauchula FL, (coincidentally a few miles from where I got my 455!) to be dipped and this is what it looks like after. As we thought, the body is in pretty decent shape overall. The tail panel, while it isn't rusted out, looks like something very heavy was placed on the top, and it is very distorted, so it's getting replaced. The lower quarters are getting patched.
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