Dad's been doing a lot of work on the car over the past few weeks. In addition to completing the repairs and mods to the running gear (replacing the rear end bearings and seals, finishing the front brake conversion), he's finally bitten the bullet and done the car repair job he likes the least: removing the rest of the old paint from the body.

(Check out that front brake! Sweet!)

With the rest of the paint off, it's pretty clear that this car was hit on the right side at some point in its life, and whoever repaired it didn't have a lot of time or money (or possibly skill, but let's not be too unkind) to work with. There is a heck of a lot of Bondo* there.

Now for the punch line. Dad doesn't paint cars any more, and anyway, he was never good enough at it that he'd have been willing to paint this particular car himself. But it's been sitting in his garage in need of paint long enough for--

and I am only just barely exaggerating, here--

one of his wife's grandchildren to be born, grow up, go to school, and become a professional auto body and paint technician.

I shit you not. That is a thing that has happened. (He was actually born two months before I bought the car, but I mean, come on.)

So, uh, the plan is for him to fix the damaged panels (you can get replacement skins for pretty much any panel on one of these cars from a number of classic-repro-parts companies) and paint the whole thing Ditzler 12525 (Twilight Blue Poly), which was an official Chevrolet color that year (and we think the main color it was painted when I bought it). We don't plan to re-do the two-tone.

Exactly when this will be happening, I'm not sure, but Dad's making active plans for it. Now that the chassis rolls again, he's planning to trailer it up to where the kid works so that they can cut out that piece of the passenger side rear quarter and weld in the replacement, figure out whether the door skin on that side can be salvaged or if it needs to be replaced, and so on, and then paint. Which is pretty exciting.

--G.
* other body fillers are available
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.