[roger1]

Originally Posted by gtohurstjudge

You are doing a great job on the car, and this is a great thread with all the pics.
As the owner of a 69 GTO convertible for 50 years and having had my car completely apart twice and restored it, your pics look like Deja Vu. I have a couple of comments regarding things that have been mentioned so far. The
hole that was cut in the right inner fender was cut out in order to replace the blower motor without removing the inner fender. I used to have a trap door
cut into mine for this until I made my car a show car, then I put on a different inner fender out of a parts car. The reason why these cars rust out so bad around
the rear wheel well lips and the rear quarters at the tail end are due to the foam
rubber caulk used to seal up the seams at these locations. This caulk which became porous foam rubber when it dried absorbed moisture like a sponge.
The other area where some of these cars rust out is on the hood about 3 inches
in front of the rear edge, all the way across, again because of foam rubber caulk
used between the outer skin and the rear hood inner brace. On the hood, if you
are lucky you have one of the hoods where latex caulk was used on the brace...these hoods never rust out. If you have a hood assembled with foam caulk, it would have had rust bubbles in it around 1975, even if it was a desert car. The hoods were made both ways, but the rear quarters always had the foam caulk in them. If your hood has rust bubbles, toss it and get another one,
because if you replace the bad section the rust will come back again next door to your previous repair. When these hoods start to rust out they are scrap metal. When you repair the front fender rust behind the front wheel well way
down low, you need to modify the fender to prevent future problems by cutting
away the bottom of the fender brace so that dirt and water just flow on through and don't get trapped in the box at the bottom of the fender. In my opinion, the foam caulk and the boxed fender braces were put there on purpose to cause rust and encourage you to buy a new car.....there is no other logical reason for them being there. You obviously are doing a seriously nice resto, so you need to have Just Dashes redo your dash. The key to having the dash come out right
when they do it is to tell them up front that you want the old vinyl and foam removed from your dash core and that you want them to apply new foam and then new vinyl. I have seen dashes they have done on 69's where they simply
cut out the bad areas on the top and didn't strip off the old vinyl except on the top......this causes the puffiness that was described in a previous post. My Just
Dashes dash is undetectable from a new original because I insisted that it be completely stripped first. Be sure on the interior that you use Legendary and
not PUI on the upholstery......the PUI pleats go completely flat a couple of months after installation, and on their door panels the chrome mylar peels off.

Thanks for the great info! Super valuable tips.
I will do exactly what you say with my dash. Also now I don't have to research which interior to buy. I saw Ames carried both and didn't know which one was better.
I guess I lucked out with which way the factory did my hood. There's not a spec of rust on it that I can see. The entire upper part of my car is in unbelievably good shape. Good to know now about that foam caulk. I'll get rid of all that I can and use good quality stuff where I need to replace it with.
I'll come back to this post once I strip my fender inside and out to see what you are describing there.

At about 10:30 AM I decided it looked like it wasn't going to rain today. So I got started with blasting the frame. My wife got a couple of photos of me in action:





Late in the day my neighbor stopped by again. He said he could tell by how much my compressor was running that I must be blasting today. And again, great timing I just completed getting it 3/4 completed and needed help to turn the frame over.
So I'll be ready to get the frame blasting complete tomorrow.







Just for an fyi, I used up about 2 - 50 lb bags of blasting media to do what I did today. I used the coal slag called Black Diamond that Tractor Supply has for $9 a bag. I also reclaimed what I could sweep up from the concrete twice.