Here is our perpetual project.....
The 1968 442 was the beginning of the new body style. More of what is considered a mid-sized car, it is certainly a classic body style. Originally equipped with a 400, this particular car has a 425 with a 455 crank. The four speed is original and has been rebuilt. It is a bit of a rust bucket so we are in a life long restore job..... |
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Here is a shot of the car and Melissa when we lived in L.A.
This shot was taken at Pismo Beach.
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Fender work
Here is the car under fender reconstruction. |
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Cancer is very bad.....
Here is the mess we took out. We had to cut right under the crease and fabricate the bottom part. |
After hours of work.
Close to being done. After all the welding and smoothing out, it may look like new. |
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Fabricating the inner brace.
I think this was the hardest part. We had to make sure the brace would match to the bolt holes and also make sure that the fender had the same curve as before. |
Bofore.
There was also a small roung hole that we welded in that was for an aftermarket alarm from the 1970's. |
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After
The finished product. Not to shabby if I do say so myself.... |
All done.
Putting it on the car was not as bad as we thought. |
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Windshield issues
The windshield was cracked when Melissa bought the car back in the early 1990’s. Due to money issue she never had it replaced. It was finally time to do it. We thought this would be an easy 30 minute job. Boy were we wrong. It seemed like half the dash was coming out with the windshield. Tri State Glass of Phoenix supplied the glass. What a can of worms this turned out to be. |
Let the fun begin.
Troy at Tri State Glass said he knew a guy that could possibly fix this mess. We figured that we could do it ourselves. Save some money and learn some new techniques. We welded small pieces of sheet metal together to try and duplicate the curve plus get the angle for the windshield to sit on. We didn't have an english wheel to make on long piece otherwise we would have done it that way. |
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Heres making sure the rust stays away.
We painted the new steel with Rust Encapsulator from Easwood. This stuff seems to work pretty good. We have used it before with good results.We let it dry for 3-4 days before we do any painting on it. |
Looks like were ready for some glass.
Troy at Tri State Glass was called after two weeks. He thought we were bullshitting when we said to come on down to instal the glass. He was figuring 8-12 months before he would be seeing the car again. I would have figured about 2-2 1/2 years if we took it to a body shop. |
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Lets go cruisin'
Well here it is. A total of 2 1/2 weeks. Not to shabby, even Troy was impressed at how well it turned out. We weren't sure if it was going to be good enough. I will do it again in a heart beat if we have to, but I hope we don't get a car that is this bad again...... |
Check this out
This has nothing to do with the car in progress just a cool picture of a model I took. I just like the way it came out. |
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