Mountain Man Trails: 1967 Pontiac Lemans #2 - budget build - episode three, products, rough body work

October 5th, 2024:

October 6th, 2024:

Episode one, introduction, here.

Episode two, disassembly and assessment, here.

Episode three, rough body work, here.

Episode four, quarters, here.

Episode five, toe panel and rocker, here.

Episode six, fenders, inner fenders, here.

Episode seven, the doors, found here.

Episode eight, tail light panel, found here.

Episode nine - Hood, windshield gutter, back glass gutter

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10/17/24 While waiting for my patch panels to arrive I did some hammer work on the major body damage. This episode covers

Products I use
Pounding out driver quarter
Pounding out driver door
Pounding out the center area of the tail light panel
Making two core supports one
Pounding out and shaping passenger fender

I'll be adding to this episode as I progress.

Products

I use certain products, not because they're the best or the cheapest or whatever, but because I'm familiar with them. There may be cheaper or better products, but I'm not in the mood to experiment when what I'm using works.

I suppose this makes me a curmudgeon of sorts.

POR15

Rusty parts are a pain. One thing that has made it easier for me is POR15, which is a rust sealing paint. A wirebrushing is the only prep required. It is attracted to rust and bonds to it. It dries very hard, but is sensitive to UV. So I only use it on undercarriage parts and things like floorboards.

Shrinking Disc

I took delivery of this shrinking disc from wolfes metal fabrication:

He's gotten some good reviews, and has posted a couple of youtube videos demonstrating the product. It looks promising, and I certainly have enough bodywork on this car to justify the $60 it cost for the kit.

I've been experimenting, and there's definitely a technique. The videos talk about doing a lot of hammering and dollying in between shrinking sessions, which I have been learning to do. But lately I've discovered the 5 inch disk I own cannot just swung back and forth across an entire panel. It will shrink an area about the size of a dollar bill or less, so that has shifted my approach to a more incremental strategy.

Yes, Bondo

Let's take a detour to talk about the filler. I use (gasp) Bondo. But I have a secret to tell. I found a youtuber who used Bondo because it was cheap. However, cheap also means thick, hard to spread, and hard to work. But he found that Bondo also makes a liquid fiberglass resin with the same ingredients:

Just add some resin (no hardener) right to the can, about 10:1. This thins it and makes it shiny. Then it's used exactly the same way you would use it normally, the same amount of hardener, etc. But it's now smoother and easier to spread. Plus the shine makes it easier to see how evenly you've spread it. It will even flow out just a little, reducing trowel marks.

It's about $24, but the can will treat maybe 10-12 cans of the cheap Bondo. A bargain.

Glazing Putty

I use 3M 651 Bondo Glazing And Spot Putty because it's easy to spread, dries quickly, doesn't require a hardener, and sands easily.

Ospho

A youtuber mentioned in passing a rust treatment that he uses, Ospho.

True Value hardware sells it for about $30. The reason I mention this is because surface prep of rusty panels requires you to either completely remove the rust or neutralize it. Light surface rust can be sanded off, but deeper pitting and dark brown patches cannot be removed without excessive metal grinding.

So for exposed surfaces like body panels, the rust needs to be neutralized with something friendly to primers and paints, like this Ospho.

The reason I need it is a previous owner had done his best to try to strip the car, and presumably gave up when he made the same discovery I did: This paint is goopy and nearly impossible to sand. So there were bare patches of metal all over the car:

Over time this rust became deeply entrenched. Ospho is supposed to be the answer. So I coated all the rust with it and I'll let it cure, then sand off the residue. If all goes as promised, I will never have a rust problem.

Primer

The primer I use is this:

I like it because it dries slightly glossy, lays down really nice, sands out easily, and is not terribly expensive at about $100 on ebay for the gallon and the hardener.

Rough Body Work

The main reason to do this work, which consists mainly of pushing out collapsed panels, it to determine if the panel is savable. I might as well find out what I will need to buy.

Driver Quarter

Pushing out this damage is necessary for the driver quarter because the damage needs to be straightened before the patch panel can be welded in:

Not only is it pushed in, there's a horizontal crease below it (out of sight). There was also a cave-in in front of the driver's rear wheel. And of course the radiused wheel lip. And as I discovered later, the area around the tail light was rusted out (this is covered in episode six). Frankly, had I known I might have just popped for the whole replacement skin.

First I worked from inside the trunk with a 2x4 lever and a pry bar to work out the pushed-in area. At the same time I relieved the stress in the panel by tapping around the outside of the dent on the other side. Here's the result:

You can just see the lower body area that still has some damage, but the patch panel will replace this area.

I did some sanding:

The paint turned to goop as I sanded with a flap disk, so I swapped to a wire wheel for the results you see. This was a lot of work.

Driver Door

I also spent some time on the driver door:

This was much more difficult than the quarter panel because of the lack of access from the inside. I put the 2x4 to work again. Plus my pry bar, which is a fairly flat piece of steel, makes a good panel slapper.

Again, some pretty good success:

That rag is so I won't bang the Camaro with the door.

I go into a lot more detail in Episode seven. The damage was a lot more severe than it originally appeared, to the point where I wondered if I could even save the door.

Tail Light Panel

I also spent some time on the center of taillight panel:

You can see that the area is pushed up as well as in. First I got the bumper off (never an easy job). That revealed the damage was more extensive than I thought. Plus the bumper itself was trash.

The pinch weld was folded over and the hit was delivered to the strongest part of the panel, where the factory stamping was folded, rounded, and connected to the trunk pan. Ugh. Plus the damage carried upward into the main part of the panel.

I started from inside the trunk, working the ridge down and out with a piece of 3/16" plate and a big hammer. I spent 20 minutes trying to move it. I had some success, and it moved, but not enough:

Some prior "bodyman" thought he could pull out this area with a slide hammer. Har.

So it's certainly a lot better than it was, but the pinch weld is still pushed in about a quarter inch.

I fix this and do the bodywork and finishing in Episode eight.

Core Support

The core support that was on the car was rusted completely through on the driver's side:

But the car came with another one:

I thought that all this one needed was for the dent to be pounded out on the close-out panel (lower right), but it turned out that it was twisted and bent, and some of the spotwelds had let loose. Plus, the steel is pretty thick, which makes moving it a chore.

I flopped it over so the grill side was down and started working the big dent on the close-out panel. I put one end of the previously-mentioned piece of 3/16" plate on top of the dent, into the recess, and the other end on the floor. I put all my strength into the hits, and the metal started to move. I actually got it to move quite a bit:

But not enough. (In this picture I turned it upside done.) After pulling, twisting, hammering, and beating until my arm hurt, I decided that the two core supports needed to be pulled apart and combined. The core support on the car has a really straight close out panel, and the spare core support has a good lower structure. Bingo.

First I drilled out the spot welds and removed the good close out panel: