I was just talking about this with my buddy. Gets a real kick out of guys who say "no filler" but have spent 2900.00 on feather fill and filler primer, vs 30.00 a gallon filler. Yep it's a hoot.
my buddy whos a 40 year body man , painted everything from lawn mowers to locomotives ( he worked at Cat and EMD for a while too ) he used filler but a can would last him about 1/2 a year he only used it to skim coat things as he couldn't find the lead sticks he used to use , he had one of them school taught kids come it and tell him he was doing it wrong as he didn't skim coat the whole car , he told him to fudge off . and said when Ferarri and Rolls Royce skim coat there cars he will start to do it .and those 2 manufactuers try to use the least amount of fillers in there builds , and he has worked on both of them , yes they do make the paint look nice but its the build up of the pigment layers is how they do it , skim coating a car with filler and sanding it off is not the way to do it . as he said whats next use the stuff to line up panels ?? I use poly fillers for drywall repair work . it makes super strong corners that do not chip , it holds better and dries quickly and it still sands out easily
All bodies get filer of some sort, welding rod, brass, lead. I got to laugh the new traditional is metal finish, ever wonder how many ol coupes were metal finished back in the day? Nope they were scabbed together and run, if they were show cars they were filled with something, then painted and pushed. Plastic weighs less then lead.
I remember getting approximately 1" by 12" lead bars where I worked. Seems like they had several mixes with different lead content for different applications. I was a snot nosed kid and the shop guys tried to teach me how to use it and the acid etc to preclean. Once I learned how to lead on the sides of cars without too much running off it was fun. But when plastic fillers came out it was so much faster and easier. It's still not something anyone can use. I 've seen chicken wire, aluminum foil, license plates, cardboard, and just about anything else handy shoved in rusty holes and filled with Bondo type fillers. I used thin gauge metal pop riveted on. May not been the greatest but in central Illinois in the salt belt it worked and usually lasted longer than the rest of the vehicle. Besides I had quit my office job so "free" lead was no longer available.
looks like you bought my former brother inlaws car , I knew when he bought a new car is when my stock from Dow ( great stuff foam ) went up !
I seem to remember the Bondo kits you got at Western Auto had, in addition to the hardener under the plastic top, a squeegee and a piece of screen to put over holes. Years ago we used to get guys coming door to door like vacuum cleaner salesmen wanting to do auto body repair right where the car sat. Probably had those Bondo kits. "But I don't have any dents in my car." "You do now."
One of the most creative uses for bondo: making experimental airplane wings. When Bill Lear was developing the Lear Jet he hired a local bodyman to recontour the wings of the prototype with Bondo. The usual test procedure was to make new wings of aluminum at a cost of thousands of $$$$ and weeks of work for each new set. With bondo they could reshape the wing in a few hours for a couple hundred $$ bucks, test fly it, and next day try something else. By this method they cut months of work and tens of thousands of dollars of expense off the development process.
It's funny you said that, the newspapers I dug out of the one of the rockers was from Jerseyville, Il (central Il). How did your stock in bondo do?
he is from Batavia and about 200 miles from jerseyville sounds like you bought a Ozark restoration, and last I knew he upgraded to cardboard , but you have no worry as hes into big 4 door cars from the late 60s-70's ( mostly mercs )
Anybody remember "Auto Body Solder"? Came in a 4 oz. can, bought some in '54 when I ran out of oxygen on my acet torch. Some little dents on the left front fender of my '36 got pick-and-filed, but the scratches from the dent scrape were deep...The 'auto Body Solder' wasn't lead, but it seemed 'metallic', and if left to dry worked okay. Filed similar to lead...but dull color, not shiny like lead. (or 'solder') Never used the whole can, found it on the back of the bench 40 some-odd years later. Next 'filler' I used was called "Flex-Bond", O.K. if used in thin applications. Never cracked... I hear the 'hot setup' now in Bondo is 'Tiger Hair'? It goes on...
I used to use All Metal at the restoration shop I used to work at. It was like metal bondo, but was a pain in the ass to sand and grind. We used that to replace all of the factory lead and as filler on all of our high-end ($200,000 - $300,000) no filler restoration jobs.
we use the tiger hair for repairing hoods on trucks as the fibres help hold it together better and the way them hoods get bounced around , sometimes regular bondo pops off . my buddy reminded me of the bodyshop down the street from my house has gotten a nickname because of the way the do work , they are called wack or pack , either the dent is wacked out or packed with bondo , he had a car several years ago that came to his shop for a dealer repaint /repair and when he went to sand the quarter above the wheel he found it was 5-10 layers of bondo 1 inch thick , they didn't even try to pull the damage and crease out just packed it and sanded it and then painted it . he pulled it and shrunk the metal and put a skim coat on it .
the stuff was like regular bondo with aluminum and zinc dust mixed in , had to be careful as some of the dust was flammable ,
If the newspaper in the rust holes stays dry, that shit will never fall out out! Duraglas is waterproof, I've used it to patch many radiator cores in old beaters.
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