So I want to ask. What the heck is the stigma with body filler. I am currently working on a really big heavy custom project, and I will first off admit that I am using more than the acceptable amount of filler. I am well aware of this, but with my skill level, and the scope of the project merits this. Now, the root question is. Why do non body work people always scoff and guffaw when I say words like; Bondo, Body Putty, or Body Filler? Do i have the right to say "you don't know what you are talking about"? I feel like very few body work projects can be completed without some kind of filler. I took 8 credits of college auto body on weekends in high school, so I feel like I have some "official" training on the matter. Am I wrong? Is putty inappropriate in every case? My understanding is maximum thickness is a dime laid flat. If I am wrong please correct me! I will just stop telling people I use it at all . If this is a historical problem,I.E old timey 70s and 80s fillers were unrefined, or people used to heavily abuse its usage, that would be good to know as well. I mean come on back in the 80s, poeple used to make sandwich cars. My buddy has one of his dads old sammiches and it looks unnoticeable, but scares the heck out of me! I also think that was where the "salvage title" got its negative stigma as well. Looking forward to opinions!
1/8" is fine, 1/4" is kind of stretching it, but is OK in small areas. Also it depends what you're working on...if it's a Duesenburg, then go the extra mile to eliminate filler as much as possible. If it's a hacked up old Rambler, then don't give it a second thought, just do what you need to do to finish the car. and learn to ignore the guys who give others crap about using filler. Or offer to let them work on your car for free if it's that important to them.
I think you nailed it yourself RamblinPat. You said you "were using more than the acceptable amount of filler". When that's done, it gets stigmatized. Other than that, filler is a necessary and proper tool for autobody work without stigma.
modern fillers are fine, when used correctly. If you see them doing perfect body work, they lay filler over the whole panel, and sand most of it off. Or you can learn the art of leading.
First off by the '70s or '80s mud was pretty well refined. The stuff we could buy in the '60s was pretty crappy and pro body men we still using lead. But body putting was taking hold and becoming acceptable. Metal finishing is new millennium traditional, the old guys scabbed that crap together and used lead to cover up the ugly. Ideally you would want to keep your filler to a minimum which your better body men have always tried to do, and you should try and develop the skill to not need much if any at all but if you muck it up by all means cover it up. The car you are working with is pretty thin skinned and it will take a little higher skill level than say working on a '50 Buick but if you take your time you can learn to keep it fairly straight and only need very little mud to cover the imperfections.
I have always though the same thing, especially when people post up pictures of a supposed "bad" previous repair job. You have to consider that at one point these cars were not worth much, people didn't want to spend a lot of cash getting them repaired. Picture 1975, your car is at a repair shop, the body guy is paid by the job/hour, he wants to knock it out and move to the next one. When asked about using lead my shop teacher replied, "maybe if you're working on a classic, and by classic i mean a more in the likes of a Duesenberg, not a 64 Impala". lol Maybe I drifted off topic a little, a little filler good, not bad.
I agree 1/4 is def the limit you would want to hit when using any kind of filler. But don't be afraid of fillers as a whole. Next time you're at a show scope out some of the build books on high dollar rides. You'll see some pre-primer photos of these cars completely skim coated in light weight filler to achieve laser straight body lines and gaps. The stigma of filler (I believe) was created by "hacks" in the hobby who would slather gobs of bondo over "great stuff" aerosol foam, news paper wads, or deep dents. It's sounds like you've got a good auto body education to build off of. Always continue to familiarize yourself on the materials out there and where they should be used i.e. Allmetal, Duraglass, Bondo, Icing, etc. Get your metal work as close as your skills will allow and body work from there. Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App!
The stigma came from the same guys that perfected the 'Cave and Pave' method of bodywork. They'd bash in the rough spots and cover it with filler. This is also where the term 'Bodyman in a can' came from, which didn't help the stigma either. Some of these guys were far better sculptors than bodymen. My current project was a victim of such a craftsman. Next thing you know, everyone not involved in auto repair thinks that any use of filler is the mark of a hack and should be avoided at all costs. If all decent bodymen stopped using any filler at all, the customer would be paying thousands in labor costs just to have a dented fender repaired. Use it as it is intended and you will be just fine.
.02 This brings to mind a 64 Econoline I got for free in 1974. The driver's side about 1/2 way back had an odd circle about the size of a snow rider shield. I hit a bump and the thing fell off. It weighed about 30 lbs. It was layered and obviousley took many applications to fill the depth of that dent. I barely knew about changing oil at the time, much less mudding.
LOL I have seen some real atrocities in my time. Two that come to mind are a '67 Chevelle that had an entire quarter panel built with cardboard duct tape and bondo over it and a '64 El Camino that actually had rust holes in the frame patched with chicken wire and bondo. Anyway those are the most recent. If you got that old van in the '70s it may have had that heavy stuff left over from the '60s. I remember some of that old mud being so heavy that if you hit a bump in the road it would just fall off. It had two things going against it; it didn't adhere to anything well except for itself and it weighed a ton. Something that maybe we should touch on is that it should not be used as a sculpting medium.
I used to work in a high end resto shop. One day a guy came in with a 53' Mercedes gullwing that looked mint. He told the owner he had just bought it for his wife and was told there might be some filler work done on it. The owner looked at it, grabbed a die grinder with a cutting wheel on it and started cutting deep V's into the rocker and quarter. It was nothing but filler. The last thing I heard was the guy ask for a quote give or take $20,000 to fix the car right. I never did hear what the final bill was, but by the time we blasted it clean, there wasn't much metal left. Knowing what the normal builds went for over there, I'm guessing this one was over $100,000.
Yea, I mean, they jump right to criticism before they even say the car! I will defiantly be skim coating about everything on this car, and yeah, this isn't anything but an unloved old rambler. I was watching road kill they found a car with bondo flames on the side, Ha! I once had an old salvage title 72 matador wagon donor car, and before it got sent to the crusher, I was being a rowdy 15 year old and swung a hatchet at the rearmost pillar. Seriously, it was like over an inch deep... in a pillar! I think we are all on the same page here though. I did try my hand a lead body work though, with only a 5 minute youtube video for instruction. It worked out really well for some big gaps I felt bad about filling and was being too lazy to weld up. The only problem was the cost and how much of it just fell onto the ground. Fun experiment though, highly recommended!
Well the nice thing about lead is you can pick it up and use it again. LOL Anything can be screwed up, men have been doing that for a long time, good men overcome it.
You are correct, most people don't know what they are talking about. I would like to see some of these know it alls restore a 50 year old car to show condition using NO body filler at all. It would be good for a laugh if nothing else. You do the best work you can, then use filler, primer and paint to make it look good. Sort of the way Hollywood makes a star out of a pretty girl, using makeup to take her from an 8 to a 10. I also laugh at the idea that filler will fall off or fail if it is more than 1/4" thick. I have seen it 2, 3 inches thick in old cars and it was still in perfect shape after 20 years or more. It is the thin coats that peel off easiest, if dampness gets behind them. But that is failure or rusting of the steel not the filler. If you did bodywork in the Northeast 20 - 50 years ago you saw LOTS of rusted out cars and banged up cars that had plenty of filler in them that never went bad. By the way, most of the time it is not a question of the bodyman's talent, it is a matter of what the customer is willing to pay for. We can all do better work, but what we can't do is feed our families by doing 20 hours work for 2 hours pay.
I think the filler stigma is the same reason original paint (patina) is in right now. People are tired of fixing shitty work from time past. The cars in the worse shape I see are the ones that have been repainted or have had body damage "fixed" with filler. People who "restore" cars by throwing body filler and cheap paint on them are signing a death warrant in my opinion because now moisture is going to be trapped and cause major rust. Filler isn't necessarily a bad thing; I just finished my first hammer formed piece and I am definitely going to use filler on it. Just some of my observations.
So he spent $100,000 to get his car back looking like it did when he drove in. It sounds to me like he would have been way better off if he just drove the car the way it was.
LOL we are talking about a guy who bought a gull wing Mercedes and didn't have it checked until after he bought it.
My thoughts exactly. These were the people we referred to as having more dollars than sense. A lot of the clients were members of exclusive car clubs, and they had to have a car in the shop to talk about at the meetings. Now a lot of these people had never touched a wrench in their life, and they competed with they're fellow members as to who paid the most to have their cars worked on. I mean everyone knows a $40,000 paint job is an embarrassment sitting next to a $60,000 paint job. It was a lifestyle I could never wrap my head around.
Boyd used body filler as a sculpting tool, showed it right on TV..Only other time I saw it used that way was in Jamaca...
You are so right, customers want the lead work, metal finish thing but when they get the quote they want to cut a deal, they usually get it as a bondo deal. From time to time you get a customer who agrees to pay, currently I'm working on an aluminum car that the owner wants unpainted and polished : it's gonna be an expensive one. I know one like this but with a 300 roadster...
I'm seeing more people mention skim coating a entire car or entire panel now to get it perfectly straight on of the high buck show cars, is this true ?
I think some of the "skimming the whole thing" is possibly not bondo type fillers but two part glaze.