BODYWORK
BODYWORK SUCKS
I wasn't looking forward to this part more than anything else I'd done so far. I equate bodywork to mudding drywall. People who are good at it amaze me and it's something that again, I just don't have patience for. I went into this knowing I had to take my time, be extremely detail-oriented, would get tremendous back pain, and come away proud all at the same time.
A coworker of mine lent me a body sanding toolkit to aid in this project, and another gave me a sandblaster should I end up needing it. Which I did for the vent piece on the front of the car. One step at a time, I went to town. I put some of the glass back in to make sure I didn't taint my newly installed interior.
This whole process was cyclical and repetitive. Apply body filler to a couple areas... sand away, shine a flashlight on and hunt for shadows to make sure it's flat... rinse and repeat until it looked good. It took some serious time. During this time I also sanded away all of the original body filler from the previous owner - mostly for consistency's sake.
When I was finally done I did a light skim coat of primer from a rattle can on one of the doors that needed the most work to see what the overall finish would look like and to identify imperfections. This was not a good idea as I'd find out later - the lacquer base from my rattle can did not play nice with my enamel primer from Eastwood. I'm really glad I caught that early and didn't end up spraying the whole car or something. Live and learn.
During this process, I found the second rust area. I say the second, because after this I didn't find another single spot on the car. This was the last one. Unfortunately, it was the dog-leg that was rusted. What happened is just inside the door, the dog leg metal overlaps the runner the wrong way (you can see this in the picture above), so when water collects in there it stops at that overlap point. That had rusted and let water into where the dog leg is, and over the past four decades ate away at the metal. I didn't see it prior because it was covered by an aluminum trim piece and vinyl wrap. It had to be addressed and I'd be lying if it didn't cross my mind to just ignore it and deal with it later, but again - be patient this time. So I got an angle grinder and cut the shit out of it.
For this part I got real creative. I cut the piece out all the way to healthy metal. It created the weird ass shape you see above. How was I going to fix that... I'm not a welder. I don't have a welder. I didn't know how to find someone who could weld. But hey when faced with adversity you adapt and figure it out. So that's what I did.
My goal was to find a way to cut a piece of sheet metal to fit that weird shape. I bought some sheet metal from a local supplier and brought it home. Then - and this is where vinyl comes into play - I cut a piece of clear transfer tape from a roll I had lying around and stuck it to the side of the car. Transfer tape is just a clear adhesive tape that's less tacky than normal vinyl and is used when applying decals to cars or signs. You apply it to the decal, peel the decal up from its backing paper, stick the tape/decal to the car and peel off the transfer tape. I traced the outline with a Sharpie marker and just like that, I had a template.
Then, I took the clear transfer tape with the template drawn on it, stuck it to my flat piece of sheet metal and used a Vvivid knife to cut my trace mark, leaving behind the exact shape I needed for this patch. Again, traced that outline with my sharpie directly on the metal. I clamped the sheet metal to a sawhorse and started cutting the shape with the angle grinder, little bits at a time until I got it to fit. You can see the end result below. In summary - it worked amazingly.
I'm especially proud of this fix - I didn't use a YouTube video for this one, I figured it out on my own. I'm sure there's a video out there that uses a similar method, and if there is I don't want to know about it. Let me have this one!
Once I got the piece to fit perfectly I needed to find a welder. I posted an ad on CraigsList looking for a welder. A guy replied to the ad and lived in the neighborhood right behind me - what luck! I drove over there and $50 later I had my patch.
TAIL LIGHTS
As stated earlier, I had to do something about the tail lights. The bezels were refinished in a good way, but when I was taking everything apart, I came face to face with just how brittle the plastic was and I broke every single piece bad enough in a way that I could not recover from it. A decision had to be made to either buy a non-damaged bezel kit, or find something close to non-damaged. Well, non-damaged would've run me around $550 at the time, and I'd have had to ship them in from Brazil which would take forever, and probably not be worth it, so to eBay I went. Lots of people were selling bezels, all of which were damaged in some way. Lucky for me, I stumbled across a guy selling a set of real ugly ones, but ones that weren't horribly unrecoverable - so $80 later, they were on their way.
When they finally arrived, I ripped open the package and combined my remaining good parts and pieces with the replacement kits good parts and pieces. I used JB Weld to fix some of the cracks and imperfections in the bezels, sanded them down, and repeated this process until I felt confident in the end result.
I had originally thought to paint the, just like everyone else does, but it crossed my mind to do something different - vinyl wrap. And not just some plain vinyl wrap - carbon fiber. I happened to have had enough leftover from my Focus ST hood wrap, so here we go.
It was a challenge to get this to look right. I didn't have a way to mount the bezel to anything, so it was nearly impossible to get leverage as I tried to heat, stretch and pull the material across the uniquely shaped bezel. I stuck with it though, and they turned out pretty nice.
MOVING ON
I didn't take a ton of photos during the bodywork process. I don't know why really - maybe because there really wasn't that much to have to do, but probably because I didn't want to ever be reminded of how much of a pain in the ass it was regardless. I was ready to move on.