Body filler abuse, I think we have a record!

...note to self: Do NOT buy a car from anyone that posted on this thread...

 

C'mon Larry.. we all know you didn't get that slick paint from perfect metalwork.

 

...look at post #21 of this thread...

 

The definition of "cave it and pave it"...oh well.

 

hahahahaha!!!!!

 

That's a lot of bondo!

My brother gave up on a 67 Fairlane after he pulled a hunk of bondo out and discovered some one used his old tshirt and shorts to fill behind the bondo

 

Does anybody know about "bondo worms"??

 

...'splain...

 

We had to repair a car from a used car lot one time that was brought in due to some "weird lines in the paint. After further investigation, we discovered the cause of the weird lines. Some one in the past had cut off most of the quarter panel skin (We assumed it was either rusted damaged beyond repair) and replaced it with Fanta brand soda cans. They had cut the tops and bottoms off of the cans, flattened them all out and pop riveted them all together to make up the new quarter. THAT is the strangest thing that I have seen.

 

13 gallons? your my new hero.

when we parted out the 56 lancer there was an inch of bondo on the whole car, literally. and the rockers and such were pop riveted on. draggin ass tore a chunk out of the frame with his bare hand. it was a beaut

 

Gent brought his First Series Chevy pickup to my friend Roger for bear claw door hinges. A very nice looking truck with good paint, interior, and a new Chevy fuel injected motor. Fresh of the internet and supposedly built by a respected small shop out West.

When they opened the door jams up to fit the latches there was no steel to weld to. Just bond. So they expanded the search. They found steel but they also found more bondo. And the more they looked the more bondo they found. So the owner agreed to have it blasted, fixed and repainted.

The bottoms of the doors had rusted out and they were "fixed" with flattened one gallon paint thinner cans, pop rivets, and bondo. The rear fenders were fixed the same way. The cab was rusted through in the quarters, corners, jambs, sills and around the windshield. And the fix of choice was bondo. Lots of bondo.

As things stand now, the owner paid big bucks to get in and will spend almost as much at Roger's getting what he thought he had in the first place.

 

OK....Here's a bondo lesson for all you rookies out there......If you have a german shepherd sized hole you need to do a "little" bondo work on, (so you can ebay it to some sucker), here's how it's done. Get your cheese grater out and shave some fresh bondo when it's just about hard....get a nice pile of shavings, or "worms" and mix em into your next gallon of mixed mud. This makes a nice basketball sized lump that you have mixed on a piece of smooth cardboard. Pick up the cardboard concoction, and form it on the offending dog shaped hole......light pressure so the cardboard lays flat on the panel......hold it till it starts to set up and when its kicked, peel off the cardboard....and voila!!!! READY FOR PAINT!!!!!!!!!!!!......this finishes the lesson of ...beat it low and fill it with dough. C'mon man....the guy that makes bondo has kids to feed too! I learned this wonderful trick in Hawaii....the beach cars needed BIG holes slicked.

 

worst story I ever heard was an english freiend of mine had bought a morris minor at auction for dirt cheap.had a really nice fresh , shiney black paint job with just a little dust on it from sitting for a couple months.He brings it home and tells his son to wash the car, junior comes running in the house a few minutes later telling him how sorry he is about blowing holes in the car and that it must be the citys fault for so much water pressure ,ect..... ya know what? you can patch rust holes with paper mache' too!!!! r.r.

 

Uh-oh

HAD to do it! Sorry trent lol

 

I worked at a Plymouth dealer in the 70's....had a guy named Bondolini....if you had a smashed 1/4 he'd lay a layer of plastic on masking paper...lay it over the dents...then put on a skim coat over the outside of the paper, get out the board file....it was okay as long as you didn't lean on the car...

 

OK I stopped reading about the middle of the second page, but I think I have you all beat. I started restoring a '58 Vette back in the late '70s. It had obviously been hit in the front as the fenders were wavy over the wheelwells (that's the weak point). I started chiseling out the bondo just to see what they had done, & under about 2" of bondo was galvanized *flashing* (about 12"x16") RIVETED to the fiberglass!!! U-N-R-E-A-L!
~ Paul
aka "Tha Driver"

"James Lewis; get away from that wheelbarrow - you know you don't know nothin' about machinery!"

 

A friend of mine did a merc a few years back. when it came to him they couldnot put a headliner in it because the chop was so bad. To make a long story short someone had used 1 1/2''-2'' rocks from someones driveway as filler in the bondo. Needless to say he cut the top of and started form scratch

 

I test drove a '57 T-bird a few months ago. A solid #3 car, ran nice, looked pretty fair from 15 feet away. It had new upholstery, tire, etc. Paint was a bit old. Anyway, I took out my handy magnet, put it on the front fenders, and it would not stick anywhere on the back half! I felt in the wheel wells, and the fenders were bashed in about 3 inches, felt like craters of the moon! I looked under the car, body mounts were swiss cheese. I drove it back and told him I would have to pass. He sold it to some lady a few days later. I tried to buy the fender skirts for the wife's '55, but he wouldn't part with them, even though he never used them, and they were in another building. I told him it would not bring more money with them, but he thought someone would pass on it because it didn't have them. Oh well....it looks good without them too!

 

I checked out a '55 Pontiac convertible that a guy I know in Houston is doing for a customer. He had a shop out of state that was supposed to be THE shop for Pontiac restoration bodywork and paint it. When he brought it to Houston and the guy I know was working on putting it together, nothing fit. He found a bunch of bondo, so the customer agreed to have it stripped and start over. The strippers were using chisels to debondo the body. There wasn't a piece of metal two inches square on the body that didn't have holes in it. Even the top and bottom of the floor pans were sculpted out of bondo, with all the reveal lines and beading in them shaped with bondo. All he saved from the car was the top of the cowl with the windshield frame, and the rear of the interior opening where the convertible top mechanics attach.

 

I've seen thicker shit before and it held up good. But the one you posted is just plain horrible... there's air bubbles in it!

 

Back in the 80's I stopped at a small shop to look at some hot rod parts to buy and while there saw one of the guys there mixing bondo in a wheel barrow and putting it on the roof of a Cord sedan with a shovel. He then spread it out with a cement trowel. I asked the shop's owner why and he said they would use a squeege when they got down to the "finishing details" He said that the car owner was a mooch and he was getting what he paid for.Sorry, but that shop has been closed for years in case you wanted to take your car there.

 

No way i can top that, biggest bondo job i ever done was at 16yrs old on my first car and it was only half the diameter and a bout the same thickness as that bit pictured, I was only 16 and didnt know any thing about panel beating back then- just grind the rust and smooth the dents!

 

Here's a few...

My '60 Pontiac had a few signs of being hit on the left front sometime in the past. It drove fine, so I never worried about it.

They changed the fender, but they must have hit something just about straight on with it on that side. The hood had about a 2 inch long by one inch deep dent right on the edge. They come to a point, and about the only way to have fixed it right would have been to cut it out and weld on new metal I think - you couldn't get to the back of it without cutting the inner bracing out. The door had a crack in the front edge of it, too. I never dug into it, but I suspect I'll find a good inch of it there too.

It was old enough work the paint had been redone in the original color in laquer and gone flat.


My '50 Chevy came with one side and part of the tail panel redone. Under the bondo there's pieces of galvanized tin riveted in place, like 3 or 4 inch wide pieces. The other side? Someone patched an entire quarter on. Except they used 4dr parts - maybe cut out of another car. There is a 3 inch gap between the two sections of quarter that is half done in lead and half done in bondo. The seam was hidden under the fender trim; it's held on with ordinary phillips screws around the top. Both wheelwells are redone and homemade - they don't match side to side and I doubt like hell a factory skirt would come close to fitting anymore. Pieces are curved around underneath so that any tire wider than stock will no longer fit under there - it's all patchwork over what was left of the original quarters. There are replacement rockers riveted on that have no inner structure, and between the rocker and quarter is more home-made stuff. There is a sign of some sort cut in two forming sections of the floorpan. There's even two small patches in the top of each fender and a load of bondo around the headlight openings. It's pretty thick, one side has a light dent in it and where a chunk is knocked off it's close to 3/16ths. Now, these fenders are not the original ones - someone changed the front clip and doors on this car, using all from a black '49. I have a couple '52 fenders that are at least solid, but dented worse, not sure what I will finally use on it.

It also has a coat of earl scheib blue over the original tan on the rest of the car (no sign of primer under it). I knew there was a reason it was so cheap, and that was it - while it does not look bad (especially since I spraybombed it so it's all grey on the bottom), it's a POS underneath. Gives me an excuse to customize it... all the panels it needs I can get easy enough. For $200 and it runs, I can't complain too much, I can still slap it together and have some fun with it. The deluxe wheel in it aught to be worth that, it's in nice shape, too.


I didn't see this one personally, but a kid I knew hung out at a body shop out in the country where he lived (Navarino on Route 20 for those locals who know the area). They had a '60 Olds 2dr hardtop they worked on while my friend was visiting the place. He told me the entire bottom 4 or 5 inches of the car had been rotty and they'd redone it in bondo. With iron filings mixed into it, so you could still put a magnet on it. I've seen how those cars rot and I'm amazed the frame was any good if the body was that bad. But I believe it.. I was like 15 at the time and I still knew that wasn't the right way to do it. I think I'd rather have a few imperfections and low spots than load a car up with filler.

 

haha! cave it and pave it ! awesome.. thats my new line ..

 

LOL!! ,dont forget " use a cement mixer to mix it up !"

Koolkemp

 

I've seen some big chunks, but wow...thats alot of bondo...

 

Pheh. Ees nothing. In Bondoslavia, whole car made out of Bondo. Wheels, motor, stereo, tires, antenna.

In Bondoslavia, we eat the Bondo. Makes Bondoslav man beeg, strong! Make you love Bondo womans all night longs.

 

I remember my Grandfather got in a minor parking lot fender bender with his old Biscayne. He repaired the dent with NAIL PUTTY (he was a carpenter, guess it made sense to him) The funny thing is how proud he was of the repair when it was done.


He finished it up with a fresh brushed on coat of Western Auto 'Rust-Not' blue paint. It was a perfect match because the first thing he did to any auto he bought was paint it this color with a brush, regardless of how nice it was to start with.

 

"...OK I stopped reading about the middle of the second page, but I think I have you all beat. I started restoring a '58 Vette back in the late '70s. It had obviously been hit in the front as the fenders were wavy over the wheelwells (that's the weak point). I started chiseling out the bondo just to see what they had done, & under about 2" of bondo was galvanized *flashing* (about 12"x16") RIVETED to the fiberglass!!! U-N-R-E-A-L!"

Wow!! I learn something new everyday on the HAMB!

It is possible to ruin a fiberglass car with steel, as well as the common other way around!

Probably 2,000 years from now, archaeologists are going to discover the only remaining evidence of our culture and literature in wads of newspaper found fossilized in bondo...

 

my favorite non bondo repair is the duct tape patch panel
im suprized how many vehicles that there are with duct tape patch panels
and if you want it too match the rest of the car you can spray paint it
the sun will bake the duct tape on and it will never come off

another floor patch is puting cardboard over the hole and then cover it with tar
i saw this on a chevette once

also calking is great for sealing the little holes on the roof. and we cannot forget the ultimate quarter panel repair-FOAM