 Here I am standing next to the beast right after it was tied-down to the trailer. . |
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Initially from a distance this car might look like an OK project. It is not. It requires extensive repairs. |
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This car came with a spare set of front fenders and doors, which is good as they were all pretty banged up and rotted out. |
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The quarter panels were actually far worse than they look. |
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This is one of the main reasons why this car should have been crushed. There was no trunk floor left at all. Virtually none of the rear frame rails were left either. In order for the car to be rolled around someone made a trunk
floor out of plywood and wedged tires and rims inside the quarters. This prevented the leafsprings from coming up inside the trunk. |
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Both front framerails were also rotted out, badly, between the firewall and shock towers. It truly is amazing that this car wasn't crushed. |
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The floors possibly could been patched, but the frame rails and rocker panels were so bad that the floors would have to come out. The underside looked pretty bad, so in order to perform a quality restoration that would last for many
years, the floors would have to be replaced. |
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The seam along the top of the quarter panels that goes from the convertible well to the corners of the trunklid opening were actually worse that you see here. They make simply horrible patch panels to fix this, but it is still a serious effort to
make the repairs. |
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Appearently when this car was new it received a Ziebart undercoating treatment. Holes where drilled inside the doors, rockers, A-pillars and B-pillars where the undercoat was applied. The engine compartment was also sprayed down with it.
It did absolutely no good whatsoever. Maybe if they had undercoated the underside of the car it would have done some good. All it really did was help trap the moisture. At least it pickled the build tag, which cleaned up nice and pristine. |
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It is ironic that no one paid attention to the words on the license plate "Keep It Beautiful". Cars that are this far gone are almost always used for parts and then are crushed. The rarity of the original color of the car and the fact that it was still numbers matching, were the only thing that saved it from being scrapped. So with that, I dub this "Project Keep It Beautiful: The Car That Should Have Been Crushed". |