Sean's 78 Camaro Z28
- Thread starter Texas82GP
- Start date
Incredible workmanship Jared!
You guys killed it, definitely doing it the right way. Unbelievable.
Locked into this thread...!!!
You guys killed it, definitely doing it the right way. Unbelievable.
Locked into this thread...!!!
I can't believe I missed this thread. Nice job with the pics and editorials.
You don't see many clean Gen II Camaro's around anymore....Thanks for sharing
You don't see many clean Gen II Camaro's around anymore....Thanks for sharing
I agree. When I bought my car I seriously considered buying a 3rd gen IROC but the G body has had a special place in my heart since I fist saw my step dad's 83 H/O the first time, sometime in 1984. Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you are enjoying it.
Thanks Donovan. That's really high praise coming from you. We have definitely done the best we could. Not everything turned out completely to our satisfaction but it is a really nice car. All we did was our best and gave it as much attention to detail as we could. I really appreciate the positive feedback buddy.
Thanks man. I've only been working on this thread a few days so you aren't late to the party. If anything I am. I was slow to become a member on a forum until I joined this one in 2015. To be honest, while I found a lot of good information surfing the forums online I also found a lot of negativity that turned me off until I found this place. That's why this thread is on this forum and not another. Now that I am comfortable with posting on a forum and the build of the car is nearing completion I wanted to do a thread to document it and share it with others, particularly my buddies on here that I wear out by talking about this car all the time. Most of the credit on the pics goes to my brother. I credit him for documenting the build and also managing the electronic files and them surviving through the crash of a few machines. He's a lot better at that stuff than I am. Agreed that you don't see many of these cars in good shape, or really at all anymore. I think most of them lived a hard life and there aren't that many survivors out there. I also don't think the late 2nd gens were appreciated since they didn't really have much in the guts department. They are derided as 'sticker cars' or 'disco Camaro's' but I have always loved them and the Firebirds/Trans Ams of the era. Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you are enjoying the thread. Stay tuned for the LS swap later.
Ok. Next installment. After a couple of months of sanding and refinishing the bumpers and their inner structures and getting them fitted to the car, we moved on to doing something about the ill fitting aftermarket deck lid. The silver deck lid that was on the car (then primed brown in the late 80's) had a big low spot across it at the leading edge of the rear spoiler. This was presumably from people leaning on it and/or pushing the car by it. Initially, we just decided to replace it with a reproduction (mistake). My brother and I took it out of the box, carefully laid out and drilled the holes in it for the rear spoiler first (mistake), stripped it, epoxy primed it (mistake) and then tried to fit it to the car. What junk! The body lines down each side along the rear quarters went from acceptable at the rear window filler to Grand Canyon Wide at the tail lights on both side (trapezoid). This scared me that we'd done something wrong fitting the NOS quarters. The left front corner was too low and had to be shimmed up. The right front corner was too high. Nothing could be done to fix it but maybe cut and modify the inner structure. It looks better here than it was, believe me. This is the best we could do with it and it was unacceptable.
In a moment of peak frustration I laid a block of wood on that corner and whipped the s&#$ out of it with a ball peen hammer and that made the decision to jettison the poor quality, ill fitting, reproduction deck lid. Fortunately, we are good about keeping everything until we are absolutely sure we don't need it. We bolted on the old deck lid and it instantly fit better. What a relief. We then started stripping it with the DA sander and welded a row of studs on it to pull out the big low...
Once we had made it quite a bit better we fitted the spoiler to see how it looked....
Notice some misalignment of the spoiler pieces on the passenger side of the car....
The car was always that way. It bothered Sean and he wanted to do something about it. Here's a good pic of Dad and I marveling at how far the car had come that same day. Dad often says this car was the worst body he'd ever seen when we drug it home in 2006.
To try and remedy the misalignment of the rear spoiler pieces Sean bought a few more pieces on eBay to try to come up with the best fitting set. An interesting fact, all of the pieces were evidently molded by Uniroyal as their logo appears on the bottom side of all of them. We also body worked and primed the old deck lid. This gets us about midway through October of 2011...
Sean moved on and started stripping the new spoiler pieces and the inner fenders to get them in epoxy...
Here's a good picture of the car on 10-17-11 in the late day sun. It shows well how far we'd come. The spoiler still wasn't perfect. It's a compromise. We'll see what our painter did with it. Still it was an improvement....
Now that the body of the car was assembled, we moved more solidly into the bodywork phase. He started with working the lumpy original nose. He also worked on body working the wheel wells and lower quarters where we had welded and ground down the welds...
In a moment of peak frustration I laid a block of wood on that corner and whipped the s&#$ out of it with a ball peen hammer and that made the decision to jettison the poor quality, ill fitting, reproduction deck lid. Fortunately, we are good about keeping everything until we are absolutely sure we don't need it. We bolted on the old deck lid and it instantly fit better. What a relief. We then started stripping it with the DA sander and welded a row of studs on it to pull out the big low...
Once we had made it quite a bit better we fitted the spoiler to see how it looked....
Notice some misalignment of the spoiler pieces on the passenger side of the car....
The car was always that way. It bothered Sean and he wanted to do something about it. Here's a good pic of Dad and I marveling at how far the car had come that same day. Dad often says this car was the worst body he'd ever seen when we drug it home in 2006.
To try and remedy the misalignment of the rear spoiler pieces Sean bought a few more pieces on eBay to try to come up with the best fitting set. An interesting fact, all of the pieces were evidently molded by Uniroyal as their logo appears on the bottom side of all of them. We also body worked and primed the old deck lid. This gets us about midway through October of 2011...
Sean moved on and started stripping the new spoiler pieces and the inner fenders to get them in epoxy...
Here's a good picture of the car on 10-17-11 in the late day sun. It shows well how far we'd come. The spoiler still wasn't perfect. It's a compromise. We'll see what our painter did with it. Still it was an improvement....
Now that the body of the car was assembled, we moved more solidly into the bodywork phase. He started with working the lumpy original nose. He also worked on body working the wheel wells and lower quarters where we had welded and ground down the welds...
We also body worked the seams between the roof and the quarters. We used USC All Metal and then followed with Rage Extreme. It was the first time we'd used All Metal.....
More body work...
Sean primed a lot of the body work as he went on the metal panels The bumper covers had to be primed separately as we used 2k high build on them with flex additive whereas we used Epoxy on all the sheet metal. By late December Sean had the front and rear bumper covers worked to his satisfaction and was ready to prime them...
And here it is un-taped.....
This is a good place to leave off for now. This gets us to 12-27-11. More to come. Thanks for following along.
This is a good place to leave off for now. This gets us to 12-27-11. More to come. Thanks for following along.
Thanks. Yes, I'm a member on that forum but have never really been active over there. Nothing against that forum. Great bunch of guys it seems and a wealth of knowledge. I was just always a lurker rather than a contributor. I don't think I really 'got it' until I had been a member here for a year or so.
Very compelling build, Jared... I'm enjoying the subsequent steps in getting the body back in shape.
I'm also looking forward to seeing the completion of it.
What's nice is, you have it all documented.
I'm also looking forward to seeing the completion of it.
What's nice is, you have it all documented.
