I swear they should give people i IQ tests before selling them any type of polyester filler or any filler for that matter! or at least the old Square peg Round hole test..lol i have been stripping my 55 ford down slowly but surely and i am not happy with the results... the whole lower part of the trunk!!!!!! completely filled will bondo. and.... the rocker!!! backed with steel wool? well thats my rant. and if anyone has a trunk for a 55/56 ford let me know -Dippel
I once watched a used car dealer with a body shop use newspaper as backing to keep the plastic in place in the lower rear quarters of a 66 Mustang convertible. This was back in the early 80's. He painted this rust bucket bright yellow and sold it for 6500 bucks. There were rust holes in that thing big enough to stick your fist through.
no. it is steel wool. i'm just wondering how this guy thought that was a good idea! i have a lot of work to do.
HAA hell yeah. Those mother fuckers in the day really sucked a big one. When I got the floor of my 1950 almost all of it was patched with fucking fiberglass matt+bondo. BUTTTT I guess we can accept it as a trend of the time, they didnt realize how bad an idea it was.
I have a 57 Ranchero that the rear wheel arches are made out of cardboard and bondo. Being in the wrecking business, I've seen some thick bondo. I kept a 4 inch thick piece from a rear quarter panel. the whole panel was bondo.
it never ceases to amaze me how many here apparantly don't know how to inspect a car for excessive bondo before purchase. bitch about the hack who did it, but the minute you laid out the cash, you became a bigger fool than he.
well that damn trim piece hid most of it and i didn't have a magnet with me soo..i guess its just some more cutting welding and grinding for me!
Heavy duty cup brush i.e. twisted rope style on a 4 1/2 grinder is the best way to remove excess bondo.doesnt clog and wont harm sound metal. sell that puppy and find a better project.
you don't need no stinkin magnet! you got two eyes and a bunch of knuckles, that's all you need. crawl over under and through the car tapping on every painted panel and looking and feeling in every crevice. pull up carpet and cardboard trunk panels. if the seller has a problem with you thoroughly checking over the car, then walk. you gotta learn metalwork one way or another!
believe it or not they actually used to teach repairs like that in autobody classes. i saw an old text book showing how to lay fiberglass mat behind a hole as backer and coverin it with bondo. true story. a friend started teachin autobody way back in the day (70s or 80s. it was before my time. sort of.). he came in to teach the class in the middle of the semester. when he saw this text book, and all the students doing this type of work, he kicked them all out of the shop and took them back into the classroom to start over FROM SCRATCH. first thing he did was toss the text books and told them to forget EVERYTHING they learned from it. the students were PIST! he said he got several death threats and for a long while none of the students liked him and they tried to make his life very difficult. some of those same students are friends of his today and look up to him a great deal (as i do). most are very thankfull to him for making them learn the "right" way of doin bodywork.
Unless you paid an arm and a leg, that's ridiculous. Yeah it sucks, but I wouldn't let that amount of filler get in the way of doing something with that car. It's in the trunk and rocker, how many project cars have good rocker panels?
Yeah i hate the Bondo Gremlins lol .. I need to Replace the passenger side rear quarter on my 65 Chevy II .... Hell There is probly a good 3/8" thick in that lower section lol
they have a device called a "mill gage" used to check paint millage (thickness). a buddy paints machinery and they have to have so many mills for certain jobs. years ago he rode along when i was buying a old vw bus and turned out someone was pretty good with the mud but the mill gage exposed some really thick shit. that would have been a real big burn on me if he didn't ride along because on the way home he even said somebody did a nice job hiding who knows what. they sell them at paint supply shop and they are worth their weight in gold.
A mill gauge?! That's really cool, I'm gonna keep my eyes open for one. Yeah back in teh 70s/80s that stuff was par for the course, the steel wool/newspaper/folgers can (my favorite) backing for the bondo. The best part of the coffee can backing is that a magnet might stick! Metal finished!
Dont feel soo bad, your not the only one! They used chicken wire and excessive bondo with way too much hardner (of course because everybodys always in a hurry) in my 59 El Cam. It really pisses me off of course becuase you dont discover this stuff till after you buy the vehicle and its too late, and at the same time you wish you could get your hands on the ignorant, lazy mother f*ckers that did it!
Hell when it is that thick I use the air chiesel, just angle it towards the side and lightly hit the trigger it will pop right off and is a lot quicker and a lot less messy than grinding it off.if you do it right it should not even scratch the metal.
I don't have a mill gauge but a weak magnet that won't stick if it is over 1/4 inch thick it works ok. I saw an old 61 or 62 dodge pickup that probably had 5 gallons of bondo in it with a brush paint job in a salvage yard once. If I am going to buy one that bad I would rather buy it needing the bondo instead of already having it on it. At least you know what you are getting. As someone said if the seller won't let you check it with a magnet walk away.
When doing the body on my '65 Galaxie, you talk about a cluster that was. The right rear quarter had been replaced, a used one put in there with pop rivets fiberglass and bondo. The drivers door was so bad I just had to get another one, the left rear quarter was ate up along the bottom. Oh, and the frame was gone to the point that it took another frame. Cleaning the damn thing up almost took me down from the dead mice in it. Interior is gone. I got a set of seats out of another car, but as of yet no headliner or carpet (makes it real pleasant when that Holley Blue pump kicks in. I'll try to post some pics of this mess sometime. But we saved it, put good metal where it belonged and it has a nice single stage midnight blue on it. Its a hot rod not a show car, but it looks pretty good. Just an old liquor hauler. It will get some kind of interior down the road, and I am building a solid roller cammed 11.5:1 + .060 390 for it (interesting when you cant see, but you would be amazed at what you can feel, so far it isn't holding me back at all) I didn't feel a bit bad about putting an aluminum fuel cell in the trunk cutting a hole for the sump and making the framework to make it safe. I faced the question many times, why? Because the '65 Galaxie is one helluva car, the lightest full size car out there. The '66's gained 300 lbs and it only got worse from there. I also love those crisp lines. I spent days aligning the panels, the body went back on the frame perfectly straight, the frame is straight and the suspension and brakes are new, tuned and tight. If I could see to drive I would drive it anywhere. Yeah its not a fancy resto, or a desirable vintage hot rod in the true sense of the word, but the details are what makes it special to me. Pin its ears back and it will go up to speeds you wouldn't even believe and so damn stable its beautiful. It cuts through the air like a knife and has a balance you wouldn't believe It is what an american car was at its pinnacle and will take a 5 series BMW on a two lane road. No bullshit. Lesson learned? A free car isn't always free.
my 55 f100 had beer cans and screen mesh in the cab corners and the pass side where the vents are was pushed in with holes in it so i made a new pcs out of 16ga steel and fixed it still needed a light coat of filler but its now less than an 1/8th thick instead of an inch like it was
Everybody complains when something other than steel is used as a backer. Then someone uses genuine steel-wool, made from real steel, and now that's not good enough. Geez.
the 63 Impala i bought when i was 17 looked REAL nice. a year or so later the body work started to expose itself. when i started sanding on it i found a thin(ish) layer of bondo over expanded foam!! Yeah, the stuff that comes in a can. they call it "Great Stuff". i did not think it was so great at that time. especialy since they did'nt yet (they do now) make replacement quarters for 63 Chevy Impalas.
The Jalopy Journal
