History Old bondo and bad body work, Sin or preservation?

Nobody likes excessive bondo use or it being used in the wrong way to glob over rust holes but I remember a time when it was a common practice used around in the used car world back in the day (right or wrong) and it being a major sin to my Dad if you got "took" on a bondo buggy, still is but I think you stood a greater chance back then
I remember well a Body shop/car dealer near me when I was a kid where they would stuff News paper or whatever in a rust hole and bondo over it, The guy would go to the car auction one week and buy a old rust bucket truck or whatever, bring it home patch it up and take back to the auction in the next week or two with a slick paint job on it, and make a living, He wasnt the only one that did it, It seemed to be a common practice. You could always smell the fresh paint and bondo when I would go to the car auction With Dad
I still dont like to see the waves and bubbles but It doesnt bother me like it use to on old stuff, cause my thinking now is at least that saved or preserved it instead of sending it on to the junk yard...

I have dug into bondo repair before that looked like it was gonna be bad but wasnt, however Im sure there are some vice/versa stories out there....

What are your thoughts? what have you saw?

 

I’ve bondo’ed rust, mono foamed holes, riveted sheet metal over holes , used tape, card board , the tar undercoating and flat white and flat black to hide shitty body work.

But all this was done on winter beaters and “ appliances “ that had to serve a purpose and be somewhat respectable doing it.

Once I learned how to do correct body work, anything I cared about was fixed correctly.


It’s been years since I drive a shit box, or winter beater. And some timed I miss not caring about scratches and dents and loading junk in my cars without fear of damaging something.



And as far as “preserving” shit work because it was done in the past? That’s silly.... a wet shit that’s allowed to get old and hard is still a piece of shit.

 

As I recall, when you bought the pint and quart Bondo kits sold at general stores, under the plastic lid along with the hardener was a piece of plastic screen to put over the rust holes.

 

Pretty good but you lost me here, Im not talking about preserving bondo, Im talking about the bondo that may have preserved the look of a vehicle enough for people to want to keep the vehicles around instead of sending it on to the junkyard too early.

 

@low budget
I too thought maybe you were talking about preserving Bondo if it was done a long time ago. Glad you clarified things.

 

Body filler is a tool. That’s it. Used properly there’s nothing wrong with it and nothing wrong with a skim of filler on a real world car. There’s always going to be people who abuse stuff though. We all know that’s true.

Most people who are anti body filler are watching to much automotive reality TV.

 

in certain circumstances, doing "something" is better than doing nothing. i have restored a lot of cars that were still around because of brush paint jobs and/or bondo filled panels..........

 

sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do - but, if it is to cover up a bad body, etc to just make a conman sale and not tell the buyer about it that is another story -

 

It is a good thing that people patched up rusty rides however they may have done it back in the day. Many states have/had laws against rust holes, and I would have to think many vehicles got sent to pasture on that basis alone. The only problem I have with filler, is when vehicles are mis-represented, and a new owner finds out the hard way that he needs thousands in rust repairs. I get a kick out of people bitching about some "butcher", who used license plates and roofing tar 50 years ago to patch the floor in their newly acquired ride. Be suspicious, skeptical and all that, especially if you are looking at a 50-plus year old vehicle.

 

'50 Chevy I had had every bad bodywork practice you could name in it. Had a 1972 inspection sticker in what was left of the windshield.

Lead, bondo, bondo over pieces of tin pop-riveted on, an old sign in the floorboards, pieces apparently cut out of another car and riveted on, from a four door used on a two door with a 4" gap visible where the door seam on the sedan would have been, neither rear wheel arch matched one another nor a fender skirt; front clip replaced with a year older that still had rotty fenders...

 

My grandson pissed and moaned about the bondo on his truck as he ground it all off. I chuckled as he smeared it back on.


Sent from my iPad using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

Living in the South it use to be common for used car dealers to travel up North and buy rusty cars with good running gears and slap screen wire,newspaper & Bondo and send them down the road, I have actually seen a most of a quarter panel lying in the road after hitting a rail road track.

There is only one correct way to repair rust and that's to cut it out and replace with new sheet metal. HRP

 

What you do and how you do it depends souly on the results you want. Half asses repairs on a halfass car matches. It doesn’t make sense to put a $5000 body/paint job on a $1200 car.
Thats what most people have done for years, match the job with the car and intended out come.
What happens is, that old car, in its past,was somebody’s daily driver that somehow survived. When people find the “ marginal” repair on their “ classic “ car they are horrified.
A lot of old cars went to the circle track and were trashed, others went to the scrappers.

Be glad it survived.




Bones

 

All these "lazer" perfect cars without so much as a minor wave are covered in something that's not metal. Given time your $30K paint job is going to show signs of unwanted thickness of material under the color let alone the multiple layers of clear that have been color sanded and buffed.
Don't get me wrong I like them too but realize when you want to drive and use them s--t happens. Today the good guys cut out the bad and replace it but there will some part line with filler. Same with 50's cars with perfect spaceings; we all know that didn't happen at the factory. hey enjoy what you got...and have a magnet with you when you buy the one you've always wanted

 

Over the years on cars i worked on i thought what the hell was this guy thinking, but the car was still intact and the shop just did it right for what it was then a daily go to work car. When it was time to turn it into a hot rod or classic we got to redo it our way. Lead has always been my preferred way and done right very little filler is needed skim coat for paint if needed.

 

I used to think a bad job was always a bad job, but I've realized that sometimes a cheap and not-so-good fix might be the only thing to save a car (or whatever) from being scrapped when it isn't worth anything. If it's kept alive for a while it might still be around when value has gone up so much it's worth repairing it correctly.

 

too bad old cars were not made out of fiberglass, they would still be around today.
(sorry metal guys I just had say that)

 

Or cracked all to shit with sheetmetal patches pop riveted underneath the cracks. I've seen too many abused dune buggies from 70s I guess.

 

Theres a 65 impala 4 door rolling around with aluminum flashing riveted and glassed in, bondo'd to get some rockers back on it. Maaco paint job. Angle iron stick welded over the hole in the frame.

It was gonna get hauled off for scrap, but it ran well, $100 later I owned it. Drove it for a year. My brother drove it for a year.
Not a wonderful repair, first time bodywork from a 16 yr old, kept it on the road.
Most of the cars we collect today were at some point, crappy worn out used cars.

 

When I was much younger I entertained the guys in the body shop by sculpting a front fender, that should have been replaced, after exhausting my metal working skills. Also did a two gallon restoration on the 3/4 ton I bought to build the house.

 

For sure, fiberglass might not RUST but it isn't free from decaying from wear and age. And besides, even if a car has a fiber composite body they almost always has a steel structure too, the composite isn't load bearing, so still plenty of metal that can rust. A Koenigsegg might not have any rust issues, but those are a bit expensive and too new for the HAMB.

Even many of the ones that survived in relatively good condition were once not good enough to be kept on the road, instead they were parked in a barn and forgotten about for decades.

 

The deal at the dealership where I worked was that they would take anything in trade because the North Carolina wholesalers would buy it.

 

... Doing hokey body work on the rusty heaps my father would bring home for me to practice on when I was a kid is what got me hooked on building hot rods when I got older ... I eventually learned the right way to do it ... and all those self taught lessons of what not to do bad body work ... turned me into doing a respectable job that I know will hold up before that expensive paint goes on ...

 

has anybody found themselves, stuck on the side of the road because their bondo was too thick?

 

Good point there, a lot of the cars we find in sheds, behind sheds and sitting out in the field, sunburned but intact got there because the engine or trans crapped out and they got shoved out back. Most have under 100K original miles but may have been ten or fifteen years old when they died and were deemed too expensive to fix at the time. Back 30 something years ago in this state when tags for a newer car carried up to several hundred bucks of annual excise tax on them there was more than one dead in the water car out in the back shed that got tagged every year and the tab got put on the plate of the newer car that they drove. As long as you didn't get a ticket o in a wreck life was good.
Back years ago at one of the Customs North West Unfinished Nationals in Graham Wa I spent a bit of time with the guy who was restoring the 59 Ford we know as My Blue Heaven that is somewhere back east now. When originally customized there were sections of the quarter panels that were redone with bondo over hardware cloth and screen and he showed me a couple of them. It took him some time but he redid all of the suspect body work right over the next couple of years.
I can't say much because I can see rust bleeding though the filler on the corner of the cab of my truck from when I chopped it in 1980 without a whole lot of skill at metal shaping but a pretty good hand at body filler shaping.

 

If it's good enough for Barret Jackson............

 

I had a buddy (well known to some on this board) who really didn't do sheetmetal work - but at least he cut out the worst rot and used rust converter before he got busy with the fiberglass, bondo and paint. But his finished creations looked great and have (to my knowledge) survived the passage of time...

 

I've seen "Professionally restored in 200X" online listings where you can plainly see Bondo failures in the usual places. I prefer other labels that don't have the negative baggage, such as "skim coat", maybe even "body filler", but "Bondo" just gives me the shivers.

 

I like to get the sheet metal as close as possible but ill be honest with you. I'm not into building heirlooms. I say put them together and thrash the crap outta them. I love the metal work threads on here and I love craftsmanship but to me those things aren't necessary for hot rods. Awesome but not necessary.
Its like how I don't require my favorite punk bands to be classically trained musicians. Would it produce great results? Probably but not necessary.

 

My unibody had a little rust bubbling through the paint on the box side. I was bored one day and decided I'd grind that bubble out. Next thing I know Im stripping the whole box side, as that bubble was through an inch of bondo and a lot of rust below it and some patches put on with bronze over other rust. Guy didn't own a hammer, but apparently bought bondo by the 5 gallon bucket.
I'll admit I put some bondo back on that section when I replaced the metal. But Id be willing to bet the entire truck now has less than that one section used to have.


In college I woked for a shady body shop. He was buddies with a car dealer. The dealer would buy flood cars and whatever cheap junk nobody else would. He would send those to us and we would have them looking new and back on the road in a week or 2. Lots of kityhair bondo with shredded steel wool mixed in to fill gaps and holes. I took my paycheck, and told all my friends and family what lot to avoid purchases from!