OK, Here is the problem with the quarters. El Camino's have straight sides, from the front tip of the car all the way down to the tail lights. What I was doing was making the sides of my vehicle into the "coke bottle look" that the 2-door Buick A-bodies have. There are a couple of guys that did "conversions" like I was attempting, but none of them did anything from the middle of the doors back. The resultant cars simply did not look right and I could not have that. Again the idea was to do as clean of a job as I could, with as minimal modifications required for the Buick body. Anyway, if you look down the side of a rear quarter on the 70-72 Skylarks, you will notice that it "bulges out" at the wheel house and then actually angles back towards the middle of the car as it goes toward the tail lights. What happened was this, as I put the "curved" repro quarter on the straight side of the car, it "rolled" the panel down behind the wheel house. THAT was my problem. After agonizing about what to do with the quarter panels I finally figured out a fix. You have to realize that I am not a sheet metal worker. It then took me around 2-3 weeks to get up the guts to do it. What I did was to use one of the construction snap lines to figure out where the body line was supposed to go behind the rear wheelhouse. I lined up the chalk line with the 4 "points" on the wheel wells and snapped a line on the car. This gave me the location. At that time I drew a line on the car and started cutting. I cut the body on that line up to the wheelhouse and then pulled the body line up to my cut. Then I tacked and then fully welded the seam. To get the body line reasonably straight I ground down the weld in one direction and then ground it down from the other direction, ie from top to bottom and then the reverse. This did a lot for me, it fixed the body line and also angled the bottom edge of the quarter to the bottom of the bumper. The other thing I got out of this was it made the rear wheel well opening look more rakish, which added to the look. The 70-72 wheel well opening moldings have small recess cuts in them where the body line hits, so it was a simple job to bend them back a little and have them fit like a glove. I hand fabricated the last 6" of the quarters and added a piece along the bottom to fill in the space between the original and new quarters. At this point the exterior sheet metal on the car was basically done. The car overall is approximately 10" longer then a GS. I used to get a kick out of lining the front bumper up with a GS so people could "see" what I had to do to make it work. I still had not touched the outer wheel house but that is another story. Duane
Duane, I remember seeing the ‘X’ at the Nationals (I guess ‘99?) and looking through the build photos while you described all the work. It truly is an amazing amount of custom work that resulted in something that doesn’t look custom at all, just completely factory. Thanks for telling it again! Patrick
Patrick, It's my pleasure. You know we have to document all this stuff, before us "old guys" forget everything. Duane
...another example of GM "penthouse" mentality. Only by luck Buick survives, thanks to being associated with positive car-related memories by Chinese. As for El being a truck...wrong, before luxury trucks it was the bridge between truck and car. I remember lots of foremen and business owners with them (dealer where I worked had a '59 for running parts)...a market Buick could have satisfied, certainly as well as GS and GSX did in "muscle" market... ...as for wanting one, you did all the engineering, hardest part now is our age and finding donors. I love my 1 in 246 GS 455 convertible, but 1 in 2 or so...I can dream...
Thank you so much for sharing this build, I am really enjoying the read. You sir have an amazing talent..... Love that car...... I am not an elco or Ranchero fan really but this car I LOVE!!!!
Here are some pics of another "conversion". This car has a 70 Skylark front clip and I believe doors, but the Chevy quarters are blended in just behind the doors. It also still has the "Chevy" dash in it. You can see how the sides just don't look right. You can also see that the mirror is not in the correct spot for a GSX. I opted to put the mirrors in the correct spot,even though it makes an obstruction when looking thru the mirror. You get used to it very quickly. I was thinking of buying this car when I was considering making a 71 Blue one. Enjoy. Duane
You say your NOT a sheet metal guy, BUT it sure looks like you had enough skill/help to pull it off. My hats off to you & ANYONE who can take on the challenge!!!!! Especially the eye for details you so expertly achieved. Tom T.
Thanks Tom, I simply did not have the tools or the knowledge to start forming complex bends in sheet metal. If I could not get it to bend in the shape I wanted with a couple of ball peen hammers then it just didn't get done. I knew from talking to street rod builders of the day, that they would get the metal as close as they could, and then use "mud" to correct all the body lines. That is what had to be done on this car. I got the quarters around 80% to 90% there, but knew enough to hand it over to the professionals to finish. I also had never welded anything before I started on this car. My buddy George Thomas put in a 220 underground line between the house and the garage and wired everything up. Then he gave me his old 220 Snap-on Welder and we got 2 pieces of sheet metal for practice. I did 1 weld, and he said I was a natural and left. That was the total of my training. We also had to put an 8' extension on the back of the garage. When I first put the car in with the front clip on, the back of the car stuck out past the doors about a foot. I have an old 1930 18'x18' Sears Kit garage. My buddy Jim Hawthorne, helped me build the 8' addition. Then we construction glued boards at the top of the wall to make a header, and cut the old wall out. This way I could put the car in the garage and walk all the way around it to work. I went thru some hell to build this car. Duane
That’s why I like the X so much. I’ve seen a bunch of ‘conversions’ of third, fourth and fifth gen Elkies that were front clip swaps with, at best, a door swap and mud behind that. body lines that disappear, wheelwells that are different shapes, etc. Yours is right. Patrick
Ok, Back to the quarter panel. The last thing I needed to do was fit the outer wheel house to the quarter panel skin. The Buick "coupe" skin stuck out somewhere between 1 1/2" to 2 inches past the original "flat" El Camino quarters. This meant there was a large gap that needed to be filled. I could have opted to simply fill in this space and call it a day, but that would have limited me to the size tire I could put on. What I ended up doing was a bit more radical. To get the wheel house closer to the quarter skin I made a series of cuts in the outer wheel house from the edge of the outer wheel house towards the inner wheel house. Then I "pushed' these pieces up until I got them as close as I could. This created a bunch of pieces with long thin open triangles between them. (Kind of like petals on a flower.) I then went ahead and cut pieces of sheet metal and welded them up. This left me with the lip to fabricate by hand. One of my pet peeves has always been reaching up inside a rear wheel house and feeling gobs of putty instead of a nice clean lip. What I ended up doing was cutting and bending pieces by hand and then clamping them to the wheelhouse lip. I would form the piece, weld up whatever cuts I had to make to do it, and then clamp it in place. Then I would make the next part of the lip. I would tack it to the first piece, remove it from the car, weld it solid and then repeat the process until the entire lip was formed. At that point I removed it from the car, and drilled a series of holes in the quarter panel lip. I then clamped the lip back in place and welded it to the outer wheel house. Then I removed the clamps, let it cool, and finally welded the outer wheelhouse to the quarter. This way if there was any distortion from welding the "Frankenstein" outer wheel house together it was not getting transferred to the quarter skin. The resultant wheelhouses are so big I could easily put a 10" rim under the car, if I squeaked the factory backspacing just a bit. This basically finished the quarter panel "steel" work on the car. Below is a pic of one of the "lips" before I welded it into the car, it was formed from 5 pieces. I guess what I am trying to do with all these descriptions is to show the amount of thought that went into making the car. I would go like gang busters until I hit a problem, then pace back and forth until I found the answer, and then go like gang busters again. I was most likely driving my friends nuts when I was building this car. The crazy thing is they all still talk to me. More to come later. Duane
Well, It has the vin number and body data plate off the Framingham built 70 Gs 455 coupe but I wanted it to be registered as a Buick Truck. In Pennsylvania you can register an El Camino as either a car or a truck. The difference is basically with weight classification, and they charge more for truck plates. I could not use that "coupe" vin number and register it as a truck, therefore I decided to have it titled as a re-constructed vehicle, and the first time around put truck plates on it. I didn't figure a reconstructed title would hurt the valve of something no one had ever built before, and got what I wanted. (Especially as I never figured to sell it anyway.) The vehicle is titled and registered as a 1970 Buick Truck. For the following year's registration I bought vanity plates "X-CAMINO", then a year or two later Pennsylvania changed their plate design and sent me a new one, so I stuck the old vanity plate on the front. I thought it was important for the "car" to know it's name. I call it the X-Camino for two reasons, 1, Parts of it are from an "ex" Camino, and 2. It is painted up like a GSX. Duane
...comes thru loud and clear as this thread progresses...and then there's the finished product. That's how I do my home remodeling, to look like was built that way...
Dave, I am on the other side of the state from you. I live S. E. of Philadelphia, in the suburbs. Duane
I will show some pics at the end, and sorry, there is no 1/4 mile runs going on. I spent too much time on this to thrash it. I built this one as a driver. However there have been a few street light to street lights going on, and a few power brakings. Back to the build. Even though not much more work went into the body, there was a ton of things that were getting done at this time. The seat covers and door panels were installed on the frames, and for this car I used a Deluxe front bench seat with an armrest. I also cleaned up all the trim for the bed area, and altered the end caps to fit the new tail light housings. All the parts for the car were either bought or cleaned and painted, and assembled so they could be installed quickly once the car was ready. One of the things I was considering was whether I should put the chrome pieces around the door window frames, or if I should leave them off. I had the parts but was not sure that I wanted to use them. Once the car was painted it was clear to everyone that the body color door frames made the car look like a sedan, so my friend Jeremy Sprang sanded and polished them and we put them on. Anyway, at this time the car went back to the body shop. The back of the car was blasted clean for a second time and then the work started. One of the guys at Tim's work did all the mud work on the quarters and they turned out really nice. then the whole car was sanded and was ready for paint. Tim painted the car over the weekend, and I was there to see it done. I remember when he started spraying the yellow paint on the car, the entire shop started glowing yellow. I was thinking what have I done, but he said once the stripes and parts went on it would be fine. Anyway here are the pics up till this point. Also if you look at the first two pictures you can see that the body lines are now nice and straight. Duane
The next thing Tim did was stripe the car. We used the measurements from the Steven Dove book to mask the hood, fenders, and doors, and then used our own design on the rear quarters and tailgate. Tim painted the red stripes first and then the black. Once finished he took off all the tape and left it in the booth to cook for an hour. Then he drove it outside and we loaded it on the trailer. The car was delivered to my house at 8 PM and this was 6 days before we were to leave for the GS Nationals. I am sure you know what was going thru my mind. More to follow later. Duane
Like I said above, I got the car home at 8 PM and we worked on it till about 11:30 PM that night. These pics show the progress we made the first night. I had both Rich and Tim Garland, and Jeremy Sprang there and we were just throwing parts on the car. Tim installed the headliner, and both the front and rear windows with the trim. Everyone just kept grabbing parts and empty boxes were flying out the door. We all went to work each day, but the guys came over every night until we got the car pretty much together. I took off work the last day to install the door windows and door panels. That is when I ran into a big problem, I could not get the door glass to fit in the doors. I simply did not have enough room to get them in. I worked on this for a while and was about 1 minute away from cutting the inside panel apart, putting the glass in the door, and then welding them back up when I decided to take out the new felt guides I installed for the glass. This just barely gave me enough room to get them in. I put the door panels on and was just about finished when I broke one of the long armrest bases while putting it on. None of us had an extra at the time, so I brought my paints/cleaners with me and bought one at our first day at the GS Nats. You should have seen us cleaning and painting it under the portico of our hotel to keep it out of the rain. Duane
