BUILD THREAD Project Olds Cool (Recognition!!)
- Thread starter Rktpwrd
- Start date
Another update to bring y’all up to speed.
I completed converting the passenger side lower door panel from carpet to the new leftover headliner material, it turned out pretty well. Not perfect, and not quite as nice as the driver’s side, but acceptable nonetheless:
An interesting side note that may come in handy to some of you, on the backside of this lower door panel I had the metal reinforcement that captures the upper panel broken away where the factory melts it in place. An old plastic modelling paint brush and a soldering iron made for a decent plastic welding repair. Just make sure to melt the new plastic into the old to get a strong repair:
Beyond that, the new sound deadening/insulation and vapor barrier has also been made, so everything’s now ready to go back in. Which leads me to the next thing that’s holding up the progress.
I went hard on doing the paint correction on 99% of the car earlier in the year, but once it got together enough to where I could start to enjoy it, I put the rest on hold for the last half of the summer. Now that we’re into November and the time change, it’s dark a lot more which means more shop time. To that end, I partially disassembled the last remaining panel (passenger door), masked off and plastic’d up the rest of the car.
Time to knock this out.
Gave it an initial dry sanding with 1000 grit on the DA to get a baseline...
... then hit it with the black 3M dry guidecoat to show what the eye couldn’t see:
White definitely hides a lot of sins, but that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Check out the runs, dry spray and dirt, you can tell we were all dog tired at the end of the marathon booth session:
Now that I could actually see what needed attention, I went back over the panel several times with the 1000 grit on the DA until it was perfectly smooth and no more deficiencies. Then guidecoated it one more time for the next step.
Much better now.
Time to break out the water. 1000 grit again, but this time by hand, wet and with a block.
All dried off, and ready to repeat the process with 2000 grit wet the next chance I get:
Once I have this door polished back up, then I can apply the spray wax inside the door and reinstall all the new and refurbished door components to completely finish it off.
Next Sunday Mike and I will be resuming our annual winter garage days. It sounds like he’ll have the underside of his trunk lid and torsion rods ready to paint at his place. That leaves me with just shy of 2 weeks to get the passenger side of my car wrapped up, as I want to tear into the peg leg 8.5 rearend when he comes over the following weekend. I already have good 3:73 gears in this thing and a rebuilt posi waiting in the wings, so it’s finally time to make that happen and replace the axel seals and bearings while we’re in there.
That’s all for now gents, as always, keep the shiny side up!
D.
I completed converting the passenger side lower door panel from carpet to the new leftover headliner material, it turned out pretty well. Not perfect, and not quite as nice as the driver’s side, but acceptable nonetheless:
An interesting side note that may come in handy to some of you, on the backside of this lower door panel I had the metal reinforcement that captures the upper panel broken away where the factory melts it in place. An old plastic modelling paint brush and a soldering iron made for a decent plastic welding repair. Just make sure to melt the new plastic into the old to get a strong repair:
Beyond that, the new sound deadening/insulation and vapor barrier has also been made, so everything’s now ready to go back in. Which leads me to the next thing that’s holding up the progress.
I went hard on doing the paint correction on 99% of the car earlier in the year, but once it got together enough to where I could start to enjoy it, I put the rest on hold for the last half of the summer. Now that we’re into November and the time change, it’s dark a lot more which means more shop time. To that end, I partially disassembled the last remaining panel (passenger door), masked off and plastic’d up the rest of the car.
Time to knock this out.
Gave it an initial dry sanding with 1000 grit on the DA to get a baseline...
... then hit it with the black 3M dry guidecoat to show what the eye couldn’t see:
White definitely hides a lot of sins, but that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Check out the runs, dry spray and dirt, you can tell we were all dog tired at the end of the marathon booth session:
Now that I could actually see what needed attention, I went back over the panel several times with the 1000 grit on the DA until it was perfectly smooth and no more deficiencies. Then guidecoated it one more time for the next step.
Much better now.
Time to break out the water. 1000 grit again, but this time by hand, wet and with a block.
All dried off, and ready to repeat the process with 2000 grit wet the next chance I get:
Once I have this door polished back up, then I can apply the spray wax inside the door and reinstall all the new and refurbished door components to completely finish it off.
Next Sunday Mike and I will be resuming our annual winter garage days. It sounds like he’ll have the underside of his trunk lid and torsion rods ready to paint at his place. That leaves me with just shy of 2 weeks to get the passenger side of my car wrapped up, as I want to tear into the peg leg 8.5 rearend when he comes over the following weekend. I already have good 3:73 gears in this thing and a rebuilt posi waiting in the wings, so it’s finally time to make that happen and replace the axel seals and bearings while we’re in there.
That’s all for now gents, as always, keep the shiny side up!
D.
You could have left that door as is and simply claimed it was original GM paint. 🙂
liquidh8
Comic Book Super Hero
Man, i hope that one day i can get my car to look 1/10th as good as yours! As always D you do a damn good job!
Could of fooled me, looks better than what I'd have if I did it for myself. Still it looks great.
Donovan, great work as always. Also, I have to do the same interior door panel metal strip repair on mine. I have a plastic welder that I bought when I was finishing the silver car. I have to repeat what you did and put that part of that car back together. Those panels look great!
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