The Official 356Talk Forum

Now that we are settled in the new shop I am finally finding some time to get going on the Spoodster. The question is what exactly is under that red paint? Fiberglass? Metal? Like an old school honeymoon night I figured the best course of action was to get it naked and see what I can see.
Of course that seems like it would be quick, right? Unless of course the flares are brazed on steel with a nice 1.5 inch thick slather of bondo to make the curve.
I started out with the hardcore stripper, to take it down to metal. Works good on bubbling the paint but not so great on bondo, so after a full day of stripping this is what I had.

Next it was time to break out the grinder and the wire wheel to see how deep the rabbit hole is on the bondo. It was scary how deep it was in places. I was grinding so hard and long on this bondo bomb that I actually killed my grinder! It made some pops, starting sparking and smoking, and that was it. So with another grinder I finally got down to the metal of the car. Once side is decent, once you look past the brazed on steel flare, the other side is a little wrinkly, so I might do a whole new fender over there. the nose is decent.
The really scary part was the rockers. The guy brazed on a channel, and then did the mondo bondo across the breach. Very very thick bondo.

So at the end of two days I got her naked, the car that is...

Here is what I am left with. I can't decide whether I am going to start with the fenders, or get the new dash in.

Ahhh, the sweet smell of methylene chloride!

I notice that the top of the door/cowl joint is identical to those photos of the mysterious "85091" posted recently, probably putting the last nail in the coffin for that cars origins as a coupe.

In all seriousness, I think you should have left it alone and just driven the wheels off it. Kind of looks like fun. 99% of PCA guys wouldn't have known the difference, and 99% (OK, maybe 75%) of Registry guys wouldn't care.

DG

I thought about leaving it as-is, but it was a bondo bomb and I would of ended up "restoring" some really strange work. This is what I am building.

That sure is some bondo thickness on those rockers. You're using the best thing to get it off fast in my opinion,..the wire wheel. The problem is with the dust,..man it goes everywhere and I think it getting sucked in by the grinder cooling fan is what kills them prematurely. I've killed a few myself.

The old braze and bondo routine at it's most primitive form. What a survivor of sorts,...

Steve-
The wheel works great but I had to get all bundled up with safety glasses, resperator, and gloves, luckily it wasn't a hot day.

I hope the guy who built this car owned stock in Bondo!

David ,

I don't quite see what exactly you see, could you point to it on one of the photos ?
The door tops on the mystery Speedster were squared off I thought.

I love it! By the time you get all the bodo and extra brass of that beast I'm sure it will weigh about 50lbs less!

How do the fenders look from the inside? Did the PO/artist responsible for this cut out parts of the original fender or is it still all there?

Cheers + good luck with the project!
Will

Will-
I think he cut the fenders to make room for the wide wheels, I will check. The flares were the real deal, to make room, not show. A lot of work went into this beast.

Ya know?...everyone dumps on bondo all the time,..but when you really think about it it's a testament to the stuff that with all this amount in there,..everywhere, ...in big thick sheets,..it didn't really seem to deteriorate much. Seems the underlying metal is fairly unrusted. Tenacious stuff if applied to clean metal. I think it got a terrible rep over the years from people just smearing it over rust. Bubbling through in a few months. Sure beats lead for health concerns also...especially if you've got kids. Ha ha.
Take care Adam. Sure is nice to make some progress eh?

Steve

Bondo is not a bad product, like a lot of things it is the wrong use of it that is bad. Like the car I had once where they took metal screen and wrapped the edges of the pans that had rusted and bondoed it to look like the floors were solid, once good kick proved that wrong!
Bondo for skimming and filling imperfections in the body is great, smearing a whole nose and having it be 2-3 inches thick in places is not great, we call those "Adobe" cars, remember the SNL skit?

Freed up some time last week and started cutting. One flare is now like a lot of things in life, history. The good news about this car is the metal is solid, so welding will be fun, not a pain. With the passenger fender I cut most of it off, the car had been wrecked and it really was a bent up bondo mess, and the fender I am replacing it with is nice and solid, so I cut high. The driver's side fender is just removing the flare so I won't cut as much.

It was also nice to get the Mickey Thompson wheel off of the car, I like and respected Mickey, but it doesn't really work for a 356.

Trimmed up the fender to fit today. So far so good.

Took some time out today for some more cutting. I was going to do the closing panel on the passenger side but realized I have two driver's side pieces, and no passenger side. So I moved to the driver's side, which needed far less work than the passenger side for a couple of reasons.
1. The car was not wrecked on this side so I could keep a lot of the metal.
2. The closing panel needed only the bottom, not the whole thing.

The fender came off easily so I quickly moved to repairing the lower closing panel, but only got part of the way done before I ran out of day.

I did have a chance to un-pack the windshield, thanks to my man Russ at Fibersteel. Looks good on the dash, now I just need to get the dash on the car...