Body filler abuse, I think we have a record!

Sounds about right! See - a perfect example of why NOT TO follow the directions! Common sense "should" prevail! Gary 4T950 Chevy Guy

 

when I was in high school vo-tech auto body my instructor, during one classroom session, stated "Bondo is ok up to a half inch thick in low vibration areas."
I raised my hand " where is a low vibration area on a CAR ?"
"Shut up" was his response.

 

69 camaro guy (you have all met one) comes into the shop one day. Wifey backed into a pole. Rear panel was toast, decklid bent, spoiler shot. When I got the trunk open and checked the floor I saw the wierdest crack. The whole trunk floor was swiss cheesy steel that someone had spent the time with what must have been a roll of fiberglass mat. Completely laid out the entire floor of the trunk, including drop offs to the 1/4's and extensions. Fleck painted her up. crawled under and did it again. There were NO rear upper shock mounts, no inner rockers, and the front subframe was kinked. She was a real beauty of a car.

 

Dad had a 66 chevy truck, LWB. This was about the biggest rust bucket i've ever seen. Anyhow, the whole rear fenders were covered in 1-3" thick of cracking, spliting bondo. The entire fenders... must have been 10 gallons per fender. Under it was the most knarly pitted metal i've ever seen.

My dad picked up a wasted 69 firebird when I was a kid. The radiator had several leaks patched with bondo. He replaced the rear quarters below the crease with chicken wire, duct tape, and about an inch thick of bondo. It was just a temp fix until he could afford to skin them with real metal a few years later.

 

heyyyyyy:


WOW, that must be off of "hemifarris" car?

 

makes me shover just lookign at it....BRRRRRRR

 

Body work by the MAD RUSSIAN ?

 

51 Lincoln that's a boat...so therefore 15# of lead would be considered ballast wouldn't it? Louver Dude

 

When I was a kid in a small town in Missouri about 1962 and couple of sleazy looking guys rented the old blacksmith shop next to my house and rolled a totally rusted out 1957 Ford Fairlane convertible in there. Those '57's rusted out in about 3 or 4 years up there. They worked on it for a week and sprayed it yellow and white and rolled out a car that looked beautiful. I went over there when they were done and found about a dozen empty gallon body filler cans. I figured somebody in St.Louis got sold a great looking convertible that fell apart the first time it hit a pot hole.

 

That work was done by an amateur, I've put it on way thicker than that!

 

A kid lives across the street from my Dad has a Pontiac Gran Am....had a big dent in the right front door. He came over and asked the 'ol man how to fix it (he was a body man since the 40's), my Dad said "ya better go get a skin and skin that door, it's too tore up to repair". Well the kid went to the dealer, got a nice new factory door skin, then proceeded to cut the old one off about an inch or so away from the edge! Then he took his flux core mig welder and welded the skin into his opening. What a wavy misshapen mess he had then.....later some grinding & bondo and he was happy. It looks like shit.

It is pretty sad looking.....my old man said that he could have put that door skin on in an hour, even at his age (80+).

 

My daily has a patch with more that that in the quarter covered in bombcan and ran hard for 6 years, NO problems... yet...

good enough for a daily with the right surface prep

 

I never believed all the ( Chickin wire ) story's till I saw it my self.

But the WORST hole fill job I ever saw was 1.5 inchs of OLD NEWS PAPERS - filling the smash / dent - then covered in chickin wire - then re covered in 3/4 of an inch worth of ( pink ).

Un frickin believable.

 

1973 I bought a Datsun truck (that's what the company was called before they changed it to Nissan). As was the rage, I decided to put fender flares on it and mold them in (remember this is 1973) As I started to sand I found some bondo, made the mistake of deciding to see how mud was there. Turns out the truck was owned by a Pool cleaning company and the chemicals had eaten the metal completely away at the area where the floor meets the bed side. There was a 2-3" high gap of NO METAL all the way around the bed. They used newspaper and masking tape on the inside to form a backing for the bondo and went to town with the mighty plastic. When I took that bed to the scrap yard there was this huge hole all the way around that looked really weird. It had to have been 2-3 gallons of bondo suspended by newspaper!

The other one I really got a laugh out of : riding to Laughlin a few years back my buddies Iron Head Sporty runs out of gas. While we're sitting on the side of the 10 Fwy deciding what to do, I notice something funny about his oil tank. It looks like the paint is cracked, I pull on it and a 6" diameter, 1/2" thick chunk of bondo comes off. Guess it couldn't handle the heat and the Milwaukee Vibrator.

 

Now Thats Determination!!!

 

Gotta love folks who wake up a 30 month old thread with witticisms such as that.

On the bright side, we'll never run out of Bondo abuse stories. I just scrapped a '72 Pontiac that had been redone at least once, and from the look of it the entire panel between the rear window and the trunk was done in bondo, right into the window opening. I cut the roof skin out of it to use for sheetmetal and found bondo in the sides of the top - not unusual when a car has a vinyl top, but this one never did. Those cars the trunk lid with the lock drops down between the taillights - the old deck lid I replaced when I was driving the car, just about that entire section rotted off. Some of it had been redone with aluminum tape for sealing ducts. As close as I can tell GM never painted the inside parts of the trunk lid, what was covered by the inside stamping.

The same car had the frame patched in the back with 1/4" plate steel strips held on by welds that looked like birdshit. I quit driving the car because the top of the frame rotted out and the bumper was dangling just about on the ground. When I cut the taillights and corner caps off it (I have 2 more, I like those big Pontiacs), all I had to do was cut down the fender through to the bumper notch and the whole thing came off - I didn't have to cut the trunk pan at all. I was afraid to pull up the outdoor carpet it had been lined with and see just how bad it was underneath.



My Suburban I replaced the quarters on this spring. It's a work truck and while it has life left in it, there's rot under it and with the salt and all I could buy three nice ones for what it would cost to redo it right. But I had a parts truck and it was solid around the taillights, so I cut them out and put them on mine - but all I did was pop-rivet them on and rustoleum over it. I figure I'll get better milage without the weight of the bondo it would take to hide that mess.

 

"get'er Done" !!!!!
Wow!

 

I watched a 48 Ford coupe being built about 15 years ago or so. The top had been chopped about 4 inches and the body was shaved. This old car had 21 gallons of bondo in it. The deck lid was so heavy that when you let it down you had better make damn sure your fingers were out of the way or they were going to get smashed. The bondo was put on the top with a spreader board a gallon at a time. the best I remember the fender seems were molded to the body so you can only imagine how much mud was put in there. About a month after the car was done it was sold at the NSRA show in Springfield and went some where in Texas. Never heard about it again.

 

Bet there was a lot of "patina" behind that chunk of bondo.
Seen some thick ones in the boneyard but nothing that thick.

 

if it came out of the front right passenger side fender of a pinto i did it lol when i was in high school no dough or welder , i stuffed tin foil and a gob of plastic in that car that added 3lbs to the weight of the fender and was close to that thickness

 

I got 5 gallons of bondo, a snow shovel to spread it with, and a cement finisher to make it pertty. I have seen people that do it that way for years and yes they aren't in business any longer, One of the worst I have seen was a little bird the floors had rusted out and part of the kick panel on the drivers side, the owner pulled out a yellow rain coat someone had layed on the floor and kick panel and glassed over it and then bondo and paint. Surprises happen

 

Scary... Especially from a shop teacher...

 

when I was 18 I had a GTO that was hit pretty good behind the door. this was 1978 so all the information we all take for granted was not around at that time. my first thought was to remove the interior panel and push it out from the inside... for some reason i couldn't get the inside window crank off so I bought a big ol' slide hammer and slide hammered that bugger back out to where it should be. (well, close to it) then it was bondo city. when i was done you didn't know it was messed up unless you compared it side to side, but you can't see both sides at once so it was good enough for me.

I saw MY car at a swap meet last year and that quarter panel is still there and not cracked. must have been the 30 holes I drilled for the slide hammer, gave it some real grip. it had to be 1/2 to 1" thick over most of it.

 

Station Wagon springs on the left side only..........................Perfect!

 

MAN that's bad!
Here's my experience with lots o' bondo.
This was the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. I was at an intersection waiting for the longest red light ever, and across the way, an old 49-51 style mercury pulled up to turn right and stopped. This car looked pretty good, like a dark metallic red coupe. The hispanic couple in it were literally screaming at eachother, I thought a brawl was about to break out. Then the woman passenger gets out, screams at him, and slams the door as hard as she could. Immediately on the drivers side, a huge chunk of quarter panel plops off, right onto the street. The woman starts storming away, and the guy is yelling at her, and speeds away, with his chunk o' panel still laying in the street. It looked like they smoothed in the "mercury body line" with all bondo. That was funny as hell.....

 

This was in the passenger quarter of my 56. It's roughly an inch thick by about 9 inches long.

 

When I was a punk kid I had just got my 1977 Chevy truck running. Me and my dad dropped in a rebuilt mild motor and the body was great except for the drivers door that had a huge crater in it. Being young and a "genius" I told dad fill it with bondo, I'm going to keep this truck forever!!! Ha ha ha at least no one bought my bondo job truck. I wrecked it and dropped the motor into my Poncho.

 

Assuming they did any metal work in the first place.

 

When will these guy's learn, when you have to go that deep expandable foam is the way to go!

 

About five years ago I bought what was supposed to be a mint former gas coupe that had been stored for years. It was brutally straight and looked perfect. When we started working on it we found Bondo, ( the red really crappy stuff), at least that thick over galvanized heat duct metal and a zillion pop rivets. The car appears to have been run like that, including the 4" spread on the rear fenders, for years. They could have knocked 2/10ths off there ET just by learning metalwork. It did stay crack free all those years so they knew something.