not dead but busy

more pictures to come, just been busy with fixin little problems around the ol casa

When it comes to the Body work aspect you need alot of specialty tools

from hammers and dollies all the way through english wheels and metal shrinkers

heres what I use, pictured here is my hammers, each has a flat face for general smoothing and a specialty face, which includes a pick, a cross peen and another one I cant remeber what its called. also here is a slide hammer(the blue thing on the back of the table) several different pulling rods, and on the bakc right a couple of bondo knives. None of these tools are top of the line and the average price is 30 bucks a set of tools (slide hammer,and hammers+dollies were 30 each the rest was between 10-15) and you can near fix any dent with fairly little effort. my advice to anyone who want to get into this as a hobby is to buy a car for maybe 400 bucks and just do by trial and error. would i recomend you go out and get a 69 cuda in mint condition and rip into it, NO, start with something like an 83ish truck that has been kicking around a farm for a few years collecting dents. In addition to doing, you gotta know the theory behind what your trying to do, so mehaps hit up the public library or perhaps head over to the parts store (haynes has a few body-working books) or the paint shop(my guy is a helluva good guy), perhaps even goto a local body shop and ask a few questions, maybe see if one of the guys would like to teach you a thing or three for a case of beer. You dont have to goto a professional college in order to get into this as a hobby.

So the dents came out one by one.

The quarter panel needed a few high spots bumped in and some additional sanding. but all in all the project was moving along

The Fenders were getting the final block down and a little more sandblasting to take car of the pitted rustspots on the lower sections. alll in all everything has gone smoothly

As the body panels came off

I began to see what needed attention and how much. 90% of the dents and dings were about the size of a quarter. the only severe one was on the drivers side quarter panel(no pre repair picture is availiable sorry). in addition to the major dent there was a fair sized rott hole near the wheel well. When the cash is available Ill replace at least part of the quarter panel . The fenders on the other hand were just mildly dinged and required a few taps with a hammer and a skim of body filler. In the included photo above you can see the small dents as white areas and the high spots as bare metal. the gray colored area in between is realativly even. the way you would go about hammering a dent such as those is by placing the dolley(a concaved or convexed peice of steel made to the shape of the body curve) on a low spot and hammering on a high spot. the dolley recoils and beats the low spot upward(from the back) and the hammer moves the high spot inward. rinse and repeat until they are as close as possiable, idealy 1/16th is the magic number when it comes to body filler, 1/8th will work but any thicker then that and you run into problems later on after you have painted. the ideal is to over fill the dent 1 inch past in ethier direction and cut the excess filler off with a body file or sanding block. usually you would cut in flat with 80 or 120 grit sand paper and apply a high build primer then re-sand with 320 grit paper.

ok so we were at the part where I had a busted ass car

So I had the body hauled a few blocks to my house to really get working on somthing I could fix without much trouble. It went from this------->

To this in a few hours. How did I do it, you may ask yourself. Well heres some of the tools of the trade that make any disassembly project fly faster then you would think possible

The basics of the basics make any project easy, a good set of wrenches, some screwdrivers, pliers, a few excessivly large hammers can help things along but the top of the hill is air tools.

This is the basic set you will ever need a couple of good 1/2 inch impacts, a good 3/8 butterfly impact and an air ratchet. Though not everybody has the lucery of a 80 gallon air compressor even a decent 20 gallon will run things for a little while.

Now that I kinda knew what i was looking at on the outside, it was time to take the moldy smelly interior out. the drivers side floor pan was almost completely clean just some minor rust around the seat bracket holes and the drain holes. the passenger side was in about the same condition there was slightly more rust which was taken car of using navel jelly (a jellied phopheric acid used to remove rust) all in all salvagable. the interior as stated had seen some water so it needed to be redone. thats all for right now, I can tell a few of you are starting to fall asleep at the keyboard

Its been a few days

I havent posted because I'm having network troubles with the laptop and all of my photos are on there. so if you here for the project, well hang in there, more to come

what postion is its conditon?

The engine in the mustang sat for a few hours until I began an autopsy on it. the valve covers had been taken off before I began to remove it. This is where I saw the first of a series of problems. the rocker arms had excessive play in them. this could have been from the lack of oil to the lifters or perhaps the press in rocker studs had begun to fail after 30 some odd years of use. ethier way there was a serious problem within the valve train. Upon noticing this I decided to break out the camera and see just how many rockers where on the verge of failing.

The entire passenger side was for the most part FUBAR, the drivers side was little better. After I got back on track, the engine and transmission came out in record time. though I doubt it will go in as easily as it came out. Shortly after this I removed the oil pan and found the bearing to be shot, two freeze plugs in the coolant passages had been popped. over all I'll be lucky to save the any part of the engine.

Hours after it arrived at my home, I began disassembling it to begin repairing the years of neglect that it had suffered. the panels were dented but they were very minor and a few minutes of hammering and some minor filling yeilded a very fine finshed product.

The first part to get any kind of attention was the hood. over several days i sandblasted rust pits, removed rust with phospheric acids and sanded the old paint away. in the end it finished with a very minor skim of body filler and a few coats of self etching primer. the hood scoop was another part that was missing, and probly had been for several years.

I had alot of work ahead of me,more then I honestly knew.

Though it was rough around the edges, It was for the most part all there. the only thing that was wrong with it on intial inspection was that one window was broken and alot of surface rust.

The engine was what sold me on wanting this car. the standard engine for all mustang II's was a 2.3L 4 cylinder engine. but this diamond in the rough had a 302CID V8 which put out 140 horsepower, under powered for its displacement. Though it would be a gas guzzler in the initial stages, I knew that with my skills and previous experiences in the art of fuel injection, I could tame the engine until the thorttle hits the floor then have balls out power. It was my luck to have the better part of an engine kit and even spare parts had I the need for them.

The next few weeks were spent adjusting tweaking and modifing any componet that would cause a not start condition, when the reality the engine was utterly Shagged from a poor rebuild. this Discovery wasnt made until it was pointed out to me by my instructor that the engine should have been cranking with a smooth rythm. All this time I had been excited to have my first pony car and imagining the tourque it would pound to the earth, that I had forgotten basic engine priciples, Air Fuel and spark. I knew i had spark and fuel, but the engine wasnt getting the fuel and air mixture because of zero oil pressure. every main and rod bearing was shaved into the copper. someone had put standard sized bearings onto a 10/10 crankshaft(0.010 undersized).

Within a few hours of discovering this the engine was wrestled out of its tight space and planted on an engine stand. From here the car too a six block trip by trailer to my house where the next phase of its ressurection would take place.

There was a mustang II cobra, destined for the circle track but saved from it fate

In a previous post I said I would start posting more pictures, well 56k internet speed beware.

My usual customer, when It came to stock car work, was a co-worker of my fathers. one day I had dragged a 780 Cubic foot a minute carberator home from college, we were cleaning out the junk shed out back of the college. That same day my father and his co-worker (as previously mentioned) needed to pick something up from my garage. I had that enormous holley perched atop my smaller too box, and when they walked in the salivation commenced. As it were he had a 454 big block chevy that he felt was under-fueled for his race car and that 780 would feed it all day long with no problems. but it would have completely flooded my small block ford 302. I was to prepare a car for him but I hadnt enough room at that moment, as the cobra was where my fathers POS truck was and his truck was in one of the garage bays. about that time I had found a smaller 600 Cfm carberator buried under serveral quadra-junks. now I had a bargaining chip, the 780 holley would be just the ticket to pay for my mustang. after I made my proposal I nearly had t o get a mop and bucket to clean up the drool. Not only was he rid of POS car,but he gained a carberator to fuel his engine.

I understand that not everyone likes reading

But so far I havent added any photos diplaying anything of done so far, the best i can do is put up a link to my you-tube page and you can watch my videos(well actually at the moment the singular video)

so here is my video

Now you Know where come from, you need to know where I'm at.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Im in the middle of price utah and currently attending the college of eastern utah(AKA CEU.) I am Very close to graduating from CEU and will be moving on from there to wyoming technical university (wyo-tech).
Here in price I occasionally operate a business(unoffically of coure) which prepares car bodies for stock car racing at our local track(desert thunder racway). this job at best pays for my share of car insurence and covers most of the shop supplies used.
My current project list is huge in compairison with my money making. I own 2 cars now, an 1988 taurus and a 1977 mustang II cobra. the taurus will be going to my younger sister when she gets her drivers licence and the cobra is dismantled in my side yard waiting for engine rebuild class at CEU and for the parts from my fathers 1980's ford f-250 to be finished. In The next post few posts I'll lay out what each vechicle needs to run and what extras I am going to be adding onto it. If you have any questions please leave me a Private message or a comment. If your interested in Funding projects, shoot me a private message. Id you just want to sit back and relax till the next post is made, subscibe to my blog and enjoy all that is me

And There was a garage full of Cars

The Obsession of my life from the moment I could see the world and understand, was cars. Intially I had little money, I was working at a chinese restruant making 6.50 an hour and coming home with less then 200 bucks a pay-day. this bought me my first car, a falling apart 1989 pontiac, which made me aware of another passion. not only did I enjoy the look of cars and the feel of driving them, but I liked to work on them. This lead to much "modifying" of the poor pontiac. the final results were lost on a move from where I had lived most of my life to an area farther north in order to goto the college of eastern utah.