[HANDSEL]

Hello All, I purchased my 72 Lemans about 12 years ago and it took about 7 years to get it on the road. I know it's a long time but I had several problems with finding parts. Well at the time I was renting an apartment so I had nowhere to work on the car only a place to store it (outside). I finally found a 455 after 1 year of searching. Well after putting the engine in I found that it had a spun bearing. Great now I have to rebuild the engine. Then I decided to go head first and do a frame off resto. Now a restoration because it will be modified. Working at a gas station I had access to the lift. While pulling the body off of the frame I found a 3" round rot spot on the frame. Now I had to find a parts car to get a better frame. I found one for $150 minus the engine and trans. Meanwhile I had already given my 2 week notice to leave that gas station for a job that would triple my income. New found money for my project awesome!!!. Well I had two weeks to get the cars swapped to the other frames and in between sandblast and paint the new frame. Well it took about 11 hours of sandblasting and cleaning to paint the frame with that POR-15 stuff. Rapidly approaching the two week deadline I ran out of time to find a place to store the car. The only salution I could come up with it to get the car painted. A place to store my car and get it painted at the same time. One year later the car was painted medium dark metallic Purple at the sumly cost of $4000 including excellent body work to some not so nice areas. I cried the first time I saw the car painted It was awesome. The reason I picked this car is that the only pieces I had to replace was the hood (fiberglass) and the front lower valance panel (chrome). No other work except the lower fenders and the top of the b pillars where someone else replaced the 1/4 panels. The car looks really nice. Now this is my problem! Four years after getting the car painted I now have the urge to get to the things I was unable to do during those two weeks.Also I very unhappy with the frame. The POR-15 is pealing off the frame and had turned to an extreamly ugly dingy black color It looks horrible. Last winter I scraped off 30 lbs of undercoating from the underside of the car and the floorboards were mint. All of the parts under the car have been powdercoated (driveshaft, 9" rear, trailing arms and coil springs). I really want to do another frame off get another frame and do it right this time. I also want to paint the underside of the car a nice even coat of black to really clean up the underside so that I can showoff the powdercoated items underneath. Now that I have my own house, I don't have to worry about paying for storage. I am very afraid that I am going to screw up the paint. If anyone can give info on removing the body from the frame with a car that has already been painted.I might be able to tackle this and really make my car a show stopper. The four things that I want to get done is the frame powder coated $200, The underside of the car painted gloss black $?, the exhaust Jet-coated if I can find a way of getting it to MS for a good price (any other suggestion would be greatly appreciated), And adding a Vintage Air heating, air conditioning and defroster Unit. I figure about $1100-$1500 for that system with polished parts. That is my saga!

[HANDSEL]

Hello All, I purchased my 72 Lemans about 12 years ago and it took about 7 years to get it on the road. I know it's a long time but I had several problems with finding parts. Well at the time I was renting an apartment so I had nowhere to work on the car only a place to store it (outside). I finally found a 455 after 1 year of searching. Well after putting the engine in I found that it had a spun bearing. Great now I have to rebuild the engine. Then I decided to go head first and do a frame off resto. Now a restoration because it will be modified. Working at a gas station I had access to the lift. While pulling the body off of the frame I found a 3" round rot spot on the frame. Now I had to find a parts car to get a better frame. I found one for $150 minus the engine and trans. Meanwhile I had already given my 2 week notice to leave that gas station for a job that would triple my income. New found money for my project awesome!!!. Well I had two weeks to get the cars swapped to the other frames and in between sandblast and paint the new frame. Well it took about 11 hours of sandblasting and cleaning to paint the frame with that POR-15 stuff. Rapidly approaching the two week deadline I ran out of time to find a place to store the car. The only salution I could come up with it to get the car painted. A place to store my car and get it painted at the same time. One year later the car was painted medium dark metallic Purple at the sumly cost of $4000 including excellent body work to some not so nice areas. I cried the first time I saw the car painted It was awesome. The reason I picked this car is that the only pieces I had to replace was the hood (fiberglass) and the front lower valance panel (chrome). No other work except the lower fenders and the top of the b pillars where someone else replaced the 1/4 panels. The car looks really nice. Now this is my problem! Four years after getting the car painted I now have the urge to get to the things I was unable to do during those two weeks.Also I very unhappy with the frame. The POR-15 is pealing off the frame and had turned to an extreamly ugly dingy black color It looks horrible. Last winter I scraped off 30 lbs of undercoating from the underside of the car and the floorboards were mint. All of the parts under the car have been powdercoated (driveshaft, 9" rear, trailing arms and coil springs). I really want to do another frame off get another frame and do it right this time. I also want to paint the underside of the car a nice even coat of black to really clean up the underside so that I can showoff the powdercoated items underneath. Now that I have my own house, I don't have to worry about paying for storage. I am very afraid that I am going to screw up the paint. If anyone can give info on removing the body from the frame with a car that has already been painted.I might be able to tackle this and really make my car a show stopper. The four things that I want to get done is the frame powder coated $200, The underside of the car painted gloss black $?, the exhaust Jet-coated if I can find a way of getting it to MS for a good price (any other suggestion would be greatly appreciated), And adding a Vintage Air heating, air conditioning and defroster Unit. I figure about $1100-$1500 for that system with polished parts. That is my saga!

[HANDSEL]

Originally posted by HANDSEL:
Hello All, I purchased my 72 Lemans about 12 years ago and it took about 7 years to get it on the road. I know it's a long time but I had several problems with finding parts. Well at the time I was renting an apartment so I had nowhere to work on the car only a place to store it (outside). I finally found a 455 after 1 year of searching. Well after putting the engine in I found that it had a spun bearing. Great now I have to rebuild the engine. Then I decided to go head first and do a frame off resto. Not a restoration because it will be modified. Working at a gas station I had access to the lift. While pulling the body off of the frame I found a 3" round rot spot on the frame. Now I had to find a parts car to get a better frame. I found one for $150 minus the engine and trans. Meanwhile I had already given my 2 week notice to leave that gas station for a job that would triple my income. New found money for my project awesome!!!. Well I had two weeks to get the cars swapped to the other frames and in between sandblast and paint the new frame. Well it took about 11 hours of sandblasting and cleaning to paint the frame with that POR-15 stuff. Rapidly approaching the two week deadline I ran out of time to find a place to store the car. The only solution I could come up with is to get the car painted. A place to store my car and get it painted at the same time. One year later the car was painted medium dark metallic Purple at the sumly cost of $4000 including excellent body work to some not so nice areas. I cried the first time I saw the car painted, It was awesome. The reason I picked this car is that the only pieces I had to replace was the hood (fiberglass) and the front lower valance panel (chrome). No other work except the lower fenders and the top of the b pillars where someone else replaced the 1/4 panels. The car looks really nice. Now this is my problem! Four years after getting the car painted I now have the urge to get to the things I was unable to do during those two weeks.Also I very unhappy with the frame. The POR-15 is pealing off the frame and it has turned to an extreamly ugly dingy black color, It looks horrible. Last winter I scraped off 30 lbs of undercoating from the underside of the car and the floorboards were mint. All of the parts under the car have been powdercoated (driveshaft, 9" rear, trailing arms and coil springs). I really want to do another frame off get another frame and do it right this time. I also want to paint the underside of the car a nice even coat of black to really clean up the underside so that I can showoff the powdercoated items underneath. Now that I have my own house, I don't have to worry about paying for storage. I am very afraid that I am going to screw up the paint. If anyone can give info on removing the body from the frame with a car that has already been painted.I might be able to tackle this and really make my car a show stopper. The four things that I want to get done is the frame powder coated $200, The underside of the car painted gloss black $?, the exhaust Jet-coated if I can find a way of getting it to MS for a good price (any other suggestion would be greatly appreciated), And adding a Vintage Air heating, air conditioning and defroster Unit. I figure about $1100-$1500 for that system with polished parts. That is my saga!

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[HANDSEL]

Anybody have an experience taking an already painted body off of a frame?

[superdave123]

Hi. I have a 67 GTO Convertible that I had painted. The paint was perfect and the car looked great...until you looked underneath. At the time, I just wanted the car to look good. However, as I got more cash, I decided I wanted to restore the car to it's former glory. My frame had 6 unprofessional and ugly patches and about a dozen rust holes in it. I was afraid to drive it over speed bumps! To make a long story short, I bought a rotisserie lift and proceeded to take the body off the frame. I thought I could be verrrrryyyyy careful and that I would not mess up the paint. I was wrong. Once the body was off the frame and the undercoating cleaned off, (the car was on my rotisserie lift by then) all I found was rust...rust and more rust. I have...to date...replace the floor pans on both sides with full length pans, replaced the trunk and replaced most of the body braces. It is virtually impossible to preserve the paint in my humble opinion! I am resigned to the fact that I will have to repaint this car. Should you decide to do it anyway, the best place I found to protect fenders, hood, etc is to hang them on the wall. Good luck!

Drive fast...take chances...have fun!