Body Work

Because I'm a glutton for punishment I'm doing everything on this car myself I decided I was going to do all the body work and painting on the car myself.

The only things so far I haven't done myself on the Sonnet:

• Mounting and balancing the tires on the rims (had a buddies Dad who owns a tire shop do it basically for free though)
• Rebuild the brake master and clutch slave cylinders and that was simply because the repair kits for them are completely discontinued.

I had never done any automotive bodywork or painting before this so hopefully that's a vote for what can be accomplished when you do your research, are incredibly careful, and work really really REALLY freakin' hard.

First things first was removing the old paint from the parts, the car was bought with this weird off blue/gray with a horrible faded crimson/brown stripe setup. Yeah that had to go. If you think blue/grey and crimson/brown are a good combo you're probably color blind.

The front body somehow escaped the fate of the nasty racing stripes, I suspect it came off a different car.

 Original paint on the hood, doors, and headlight buckets. The orange ring in the headlights are the original factory paint, where whoever painted it afterwards didn't remove the headlight lens to paint it.

So began the arduous lengthy sweaty dirty job of removing the old paint from the body. We found that best method was to use a putty knife, paint scraper, screwdriver, or something similar to scrape off the top coat of paint. This topcoat was extremely resistant to sanding but would scrape off in huge chunks, then all the layers below (and there were many of them) could be sanded in less than half the time needed to just get through the topcoat. This car has been at minimum 3 different colors, in chronological order: from the factory it was orange, then green (this coat seemed actually professionally or otherwise well done), then the nasty blue/grey.

The door shells were by far the worst for ware, the edges had big chunks missing, cracks, the passenger door had a huge hole by the handle that dingus filled with Bondo. Structural repairs are apparently overrated... seriously though, fiberglass repairs are unbelievably simple. Just Google "Repairing Fiberglass" pick literally any of the 200,000 videos and your chosen redneck will show you how to do it. This step did have to discover a few more very questionable repairs from Dingus. He obviously had fiberglass because on the back body he covered the holes for the back bumper... from the outside. He fiber-glassed OVER some silicone. If I ever find this m**********r I'm gonna just sock him right in his nose.

This type of damage is a little trickier to fix but very doable.

 Don't just fill this with Bondo. Actually fix the hole...

That chunk that's missing in the door from the back

Once all the pieces were fiber-glassed, Bondo'd, Sanded  I power-washed them. Now is a good time to do this since you'd probably not want to drive around in a car that has 40 years of dirt, grime, mold, and whatever else stuck on the fiberglass, even if it's just so your headliner adheres better. The now clean pieces were loaded on a truck and we drove em to Scott's shop so I could have space to build a paint booth and paint in it.