Art & Inspiration Attn: A must read for all body people!

So I think I would like to start out by saying we body people have been doing this all wrong....

I mean I thought we were trying to do the right thing by putting new metal in and taking all the rust out and problem areas.. BUT it turns out I have been schooled yet again by professionals and boy they make me look like an ass. I now see the light and will take this new direction with all of my projects starting with this one.

Ladys and Gents without further adieu I give you the magical applications of body filler:

 

more inspiration...

 

i've seen alot of that schools work. would love to meet the instructor. where was their hail screen? or cardboard?

 

sounds good. sign me up.

 

professionals dont need cardboard or a hail screen... only amateurs.. It looks like they just made it really syrupy and poured it down.

All joking aside good thing I got this truck because I am going to do this correctly and fix this hideous error. I refuse to let this thing best me.

As a side note, I would like to add I found aggregate and some .22 shells mixed in with the bondo as well as a band aid.

 

PROOF!!! with enough material and intestinal fortitude, you CAN build an entire 58 impala outta bondo...... man that's gonna save time and $$!

 

Bondo sculpture is really an underappreciated art form.

 

Did that one have the styrofoam cooler in it, in high school I worked for some body shop after school, Quality I think the name was, or was it Integrity, no wait it was Body Masters, any way.. I quit McDonalds and they were payin about 1.75 an hour, I got one peice of sandpaper, a quart of dough and a foam cooler, foam cooler was not enough to stretch the dough so I got an old shop rag and wet some dog food and artfully applied it to the afflicted area you see there, I did that in about 45 minutes, BoBo the shop manager thought it looked fantastico as he put it, considering it only cost him 1.36 in labor I think he got what he paid for, Had a bitch of a time paintin it though, goddam dog kept lickin it. Any ways I got laid off for using too much bondo and he hired a guy from someplace south of here a way to replace me, the guy lived there so they fired the dog too.

 

Filled a quarter once on a monte 71 .Popped afer 6 months ,I sold it .......That looks good compared to what I filled..... Some of those areas should of been sandblasted .......

 

Its easy to poke fun at amateurs when we're all so talented now, but, I remember a time when I was learning. Old nova drag car that the hood had come up on. Front of the roof was a mess. I did my best with hammers and dollies, but eventually had to resort to filler.

A gallon in and I realized I was going now where fast. Enter my gf/current wife's Dad. Hammer man supreme. He asked what I was up too and I showed him. He shook his head and told me that I hadn't done all that bad. That maybe a bit of spot putty for the sanding scratches and no one would know a pro hadn't done it.

I laughed and looked at him a bit funny. He laughed back and asked if I minded him giving me a hand. Having slobbered a million times on his beautiful all black lacquer '48 Ford coupe, I was practically begging by this point. But I reminded him, that I already had a lot of work in it. He laughed again and told me to go get him a beer.

I ran to the house and came back out to the horror of him with a 9" grinder laying waste to my hours of hand sculpted beauty. I knew better than to say anything but did anyway. He laughed again and kept right on grinding.

When he finally had it down to bare metal again, he asked me for the beer. I told him it was warm already. He said that's ok, I like it that way. I handed him the beer and went to the garage and got his convex and a spoon and he went to work.

As he walked around with a tap here and tap there, I began to hear the sound. plink, out comes another dent, plink, and another. Two hours later he asked for the fill and glaze, laid down a thin skim coat to hide a couple of the hammer marks and said, see told ya, all it needed was a bit of spot putty.

That was the first time I learned that you could actually take a dent out by pounding on it with a hammer from the same side the dent had been created from. It saved me countless hours later working on motorcycle tanks.

 

Bondo sculpture is nothing new. In the mid 70's I helped a buddy redo a '69 Datsun Roadster, the lower quarters were almost entirely made of shop rags, duraglass and bondo. It's hard to believe a car could get that rusty in a few short years...

 

FEAR NO EVO SAID IT THE BEST , Im beyond amateur Ive repaired rotted wood and used fiberglass filler on the house ,Filler is the new Jb weld... I also repaired a guys gas station column with filler about 7 years ago .I love filler and good luck with your build ,Its a shame to redo ,After allthat hard work ,But in the end it will be great .....

 

I used to restore British sport cars before REAL hot rods.. So I am all too familiar with that Datsun problem... in fact I think I might have worked on one of your art pieces. lol. Here's a pic of one of them that originally looked like that cab corner... I learned a lot of body work working on this one and this was my final product:

 

I gotta laugh every time I see one of these threads bitching about bad body work. In most cases it was probably done by a kid trying to keep his car together on a budget with minimal tools, at a time before that old car had any real value to anyone. If it weren't for his efforts, it would have probably been junked and crushed a long time ago. So smile at his limited skills and knowledge, but remember, if it weren't for his efforts you probably wouldn't have that truck, so you probably ought to thank him, most old cars weren't fortunate enough to be saved by someone like him.

 

Ya ain't done nothing till you fix a leak in a radiator with it!! i had a fan blade come off one time and take out a third of the tubes, there i was in the middle of nowhere at midnight and no $$ for a tow and thinking; great now what am i gonna do! looked around in the trunk and nothing but a can of bondo, body tools and 2 empty oil cans. then it clicked; why not try the bondo, it's gotta hold for awhile. so i cleaned it off as good as i could and dried it off, mixed a goob up and wiped away! ran around and found some water in the oil cans and off i went! stopped at the first service station i came to topped off the water and went home. i drove that thing for 3 more days till i had enough $$ to get another radiator. the guy at the radiator shop said in 40 years of doing them he had seen everything but never bondo. so never under estimate the power of the mighty BONDO!!

 

Isn't it traditional to use shit tons of bondo?

Considering how long some of those patch up jobs last, how bad are they really.

 

I have a '60 Pontiac that I dug about an inch of bondo out of the left most front of the hood lip. Car was apparently in an accident somewhere, the fender had been replaced, but the hood and upper left door full of bondo. I got several years out of it that way -

 

Shop working on my 47 had a 39 Chevy come in with over 10 pounds of flooring cement used to level and create the rear trunk tool pan and trunk floor edges. A 5lb pail and trowels must have been that guys only repair tools. Heard tell he was the local master car restorer in the area that people worshipped. Little did they know was his masterpieces were made from.

 

Gives new meaning to the term "solid body"

My favorite is when they use expanding foam (great stuff) to fill a huge gaping hole in the body, trim the foam down & glaze over that with the body filler.

 

Bondo comes in all shapes and sizes, it would be criminal not to utilize the unique properties it has to offer.

Bob

 

I've used gutter guard, chimney flashing, but never would stoop as low as using tin foil. In fact, some of the bondo kits came with the metal screen. Others had fiberglass cloth in them.

Bob

 

kinda reminds me how gypsys do body work here in calif, complete butchers !

 

working on a buddy's 65 Mustang I found plastic filler in the hood. after sanding it all out I found a small dent that had been covered with duct tape and Bondo-ed over. ...I fixed the bent faster than I bet it took that idiot to cover it up.

 

Gypsys doing body work?...here they pave drive ways with asphalt thats stone cold.

 

I used to see them all over the NYC area and on Long Island. They'd show up and do the bondo work in a parking lot, with the "customer's" whole family standing there to watch. Then they'd spray black or gray primer all AROUND the area. The bondo was always a light brown and NEVER sanded or grated down. The next "appointment" would be for the finish sanding and paint, which would never happen.

I still see it on cars in Queens and Brooklyn. The scam lives on.

Bob

 

Don't feel bad I have a friend that collects '66-'67 Chevelles. No accounting for taste I guess.

Anyway he found the ever elusive '67 SS on line and it was even "certified" whatever that means. Opened the trunk and found carboard and duct tape pulled it off and discovered that the majority of the drivers quarter was bondo. Losey body work but whoever did it was a true Micheal Angelo. I guess that starving artists have to do something for a living.

 

they should stock spray foam right next to the bondo in the auto parts store.

 

well you are correct for the most part in your thinking, but the owner that I bought it off of was 38 when he did this work and wasn't a kid. Sold it when he was 44... I wouldn't thank him because he was wealthy enough to have someone show him how to do it or pay someone to do it. He was kind of a shiester, good trade none the less because so I can't complain.

 

I met the guy the other day that lives 2 houses down from me. I`ve been watchin him work on a late `60`s Pontiac full-size convertible for the past couple months.

He claims to be an out-of-work bodyman and is restoring the car as a side-job.

The car needed full rear quarters,fender bottoms,front edge of the hood,bottom edge of the trunk,and lower door skins replaced.

He knocked out all the loose rust and filled every single vacant spot of metal with good ole bondo. I swear that car sits about 2-inches lower now.

Yup,he wonders why he is an out of work body man.

 

My mom got taken by one of them over the winter. She thought she was doing me a favor so I wouldn`t have to pay my friend to fix the minor dent in her LR quarter panel correctly in her 2004 Grand Marquis.

The car used to have less than $500 in damage,now it has about $1500 in damage...and those are the "friend" rates,not actual shop rates.

I`m still pissed about that. The guy took out a drill and a slidehammer,and some jb-weld. She tried to hide it from me,but I happened to glance over at her car one day and was like WTF????