Out of order and should have been posted before the last two photos, but here you can see the hinges are painted.
One more thing, just to prevent rust in the event that the carpet ever gets wet, the floors were painted with a real paint rather than leaving them in primer. Nothing fancy or pretty, strictly function.
So finally, after hundreds of hours of labor to replace the complete trunk floor and braces, both rear 1/4s and outer wheel houses, the entire roof, one section of the floorpan, and many, many small patch panels, it was finally ready to spray the final color on the car. As mentioned earlier, the original color was code 68 Burnished Brown, but since this car was so rough, and does not have matching #s, it was decided to do a color change to Aqua Mist. Here the base coat is being sprayed:
AWESOME! Great to see another older guy that stays active and still loves cars, doing everything himself, keeps em young. Reminds me of my grandpa.
Gary, Thanks for posting the pics :TU: I hope to see the car in person next week :TU: George is the Best!
The '69 Chevelle that he's also restoring right now might be the last Chevy for a long time because the Chevelle owner has finally seen the light and just bought a '70 GTO Judge project, and there's a guy in Texas has been patiently waiting for a long time for slot in the lineup to have his '69 GTO RA3 convert restored. If someone is very serious about having my dad restore their car, now would be the best time to "get in line."
Staying active is definitely a good thing. He's had both knees replaced recently (1 in 2008, the other in 2010) and his overall health is very good. He rides his bicycle a few miles every morning and he says it has really helped to keep everything working well. Only problem with riding the bike has been when the crank on the bike broke last year and he face planted into the pavement. He looked like he had lost a bar fight! He will be 62 this coming Saturday so he's got lots of years ahead of him and still lots of cars left to restore. I think this '70 GS is restoration #22 for him. That might not sound like a lot, but when you do ALL the work yourself, that's a lot of cars, especially when you consider that he always starts with junk.
Gary, this has been a very enjoyable thread! I really admire your dads work....saving that car requires some real tenaciousness. Regards Mike
Great thread. I seem to recall a loaded red 4 speed GS your Dad had done at Bowling Green one year. It was very impressive.
Gary, Thank you for posting all this, you've made my Tuesday morning! Your dad is a craftsman, and that is a skill that isn't easy to master. Awesome work, great documentation. Keep posting, I'm just now finding this thread. Love reading it.
Nice thread. Your Dad is doing amazing work to a car that I thought was simply gone. We all wish we had his skills (and tools).
Yeah that is a neat car that came from the factory with a lot of options: Fire Red, black vinyl top, Stage 1, 4-speed, PS, PDB, A/C, bucket seats, console, AM/FM radio w/rear seat speaker, rally gauges, tinted glass, rallye ride suspension, P-windows, P-locks, P-bucket seat, tilt steering column, remote control door mirror, California emissions, & rim-blow steering wheel (replaced with rally wheel). Only options that were changed are the wheels (changed to 15" rally wheels in place of the original 14" Super Sport wheels) and the car now has a rallye steering wheel because the rim blower wheel was long gone and finding a nice one is tough. It was sold new at Hamilton Buick, Van Nuys Blvd, in Van Nuys, CA, in the fall of 1969 and survived very well and has never been rusty, unlike the car in this thread! The car was restored in the 90s but has held up well because the owner takes good care of it. My dad has really wanted a '70 GS after doing this car (completed in 1996) but it took over 10 years for him to get his hands on one and it turned out to be the turd I traded to him!
Do you by chance have a relative with a really nice white '66 Malibu? I meet him at Chevell-abration a couple of years ago. Thanks for the compliments on the Buick restoration and this thread. My dad is having fun doing this car because it doesn't have to be perfect because it is going to be his new "driver." No matching numbers to worry about, no expensive carburetor to worry about, no poor-riding bias ply tires, etc. He can just do it how he wants and not be bound to a build sheet!
The car didn't look so bad initially but the more he took apart, the worse it turned out to be. It would have been a parts car to most guys because it would take too much $ to restore it unless a person could do the labor themselves. Not having the original engine/trans/rearend was another big strike against the car that would have meant that most guys would have pulled the few good parts and junked the rest. He doesn't plan to sell it so he doesn't care at all about the value of it or whether he invests more than it is worth when completed. He's really excited about this car and calls me every couple of days and tells me what he's done and what parts he's needing. Today he called and told me he wants a nice cigarette lighter knob and a set of numbers for his odometer that are still nice and white and not all "yellowed" like his originals. I'm going to rob these parts from one of my cars.
Well here are some pics of "Kokomo" with the base and clear all applied but not wet-sanded or buffed. When my dad got to this stage he got really excited. You can also see that the shiny black paint on the interior floor pans is hardly noticeable now with all the overspray on it.
After painting the shell he moved on to other parts of the project and allowed the body to cure for a few months before he sanded and buffed the body. Hard to really see a difference here, but the car is wet-sanded and buffed in these photos. These photos were taken in the summer of 2010, so I've got a lot more update photos coming.
He decided to NOT let the overspray from the body color to get on the black floor pans like he normally would with an "original" restoration. The rear wheel wells got undercoated (like original) after this photo was taken, prior to removing the body from the rotisserie.
The only original outer body components that were reused were the hood, 1 fender, and the panel between the rear window and trunklid. I'll show a few pics of each panel in-process, but they are not necessarily presented in the order in which he completed them. Here is the original hood. Initially he thought it was a good piece, but it wasn't as nice as we had thought. Besides the normal dents and dings, it was rusted along the front lip on the bottom side. It wasn't anything that couldn't be repaired, but it just took a little longer than expected. The bottom of the hood was sandblasted and the top was striped by hand.
