Finally got around to doing body work on Blondie, my 70 1600 daily
driver. Sitting outside in San Francisco fog weather for 10 years took
it's toll.
A section of the passenger rear quarter panel was rotting away, along
with the trunk lid. Before I bought it 11 years ago, it apparently was
in an accident and a body shop "repaired" the damage by overlapping
and welding together pieces of donor metal, covered by plastic bondo.
After I bought it, I did some superficial cleanup and painted the car
yellow. A couple years ago the bondo cracked, let water in, and the
metal rotted and started caving in. Then i saw the lousy job some
repair shop had done, overlapping metal with deep gaps and covering
with thick layers of bondo. Rather than pound out dents, they covered
them with bondo.
Because the lower half looked okay, I decided to replace the only top
half of the quarter panel and the trunk lid from a donor car . I cut
off the top half quarter panel. Then decided to fix the trunk well
behind the wheel inner fender, as there were some holes there. It
looked like just a small piece of new metal should do it. As I started
sanding away the paint from the lower fender behind the wheel well, I
ran into bondo. Lots of it, from a 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. And lots of
rotted metal. There were stitch weld spots all over, tying together
multiple pieces of metal. Grrr! Like swiss cheese, rusty holy metal
held together by tons of bondo.
In hindsight, I should have planned on replacing the entire quarter
panel, not just the top half. But I'll create patch pieces and make
do. But I'm not going to put tons of bondo on; I'll repair with metal
only as much as possible. I hate bondo!
Fred - So.SF
70 1600 "Blondie"
66 2L "Loosie"
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