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Out
of Control? - March 17
These things happen. You work on your project
car, whether it be a restoration, hot rod, or kustom and you find
yourself feeling a lot like a snowball rolling down a hillside.
The further you roll, the larger and faster you get and the more
potentially dangerous you get. Well, I met Kozmo. Actually, Kozmo
bought a set of vintage license plates from me to put on one of
his cars (you can do that here in California). When he arrived at
my place to pick them up, he rolled up in this unbelievably beautiful
'60 Cadilliac two door hard top. I have seen a ton of cars in my
time, and of those, I have seen and worked on some of the nicest
in the world, so when a car gets my attention the way his car did,
you can bet it is something sweet. It was a flawless black with
shaved door handles, air bag suspension, and an interior that looked
deceptively stock until you examined the cloth seat inserts and
saw they had the all the suits from a deck of cards stitched in
them. The chrome was radiant and the whole package simply left me
breathless.
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We got to talking and I brought him back to the shop and told him that I had gotten the bug to chop the top on the Dodge. He gave me the name of a fella who does them real nice and so I contacted him, which is why I mentioned the snowball. Here I am, refusing to settle for anything less than a chopped top, and probably frenched headlights, and maybe a different set of
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Door Handle Plate
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taillights. I'd been playing around with a profile image of my car with Adobe Photoshop, and trying different chops, etc. I had also been searching for quite some time for a picture from the '50s of a kustom or hot rodded '53 Dodge. I had been looking through my Barris Kustom car books for the millionth time when I found it, a small color image of a '53 Plymouth kustom. Knowing that the Dodge shared basically the same body shape as the Plymouth, I was psyched! The car in the photo has a chopped top, as well as many other kustom mods and it looks bad ass. So now I'm saving my dough.
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Plate Fitted
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In the meantime, I've been still trying to get my act together and finish filling all the holes in the body from door and trunk handles. I mean, c'mon get it together already man! In my photos here, you can see the process I had for filling th door handle openings. I had some sheetmetal scraps lying around that I used to make plates, plugs, etc. for welding into the body.
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I had a ton of fun doing all this over the course of anafternoon. Not shown here is my application of filler to finish off the process.
I have this issue with filler. I think, again, it's because I am new to bodywork. See, I know that excessive use of filler is a big no no (duh,
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who doesn't?), but not having a journeyman leaning over my shoulder, I'm not sure just how much is excessive. I did my best to knock out the low spots or knock down the high spots, but I still am concerned about this filler crap. I don't want to create a "bondage sled", to quote my good friend Curtis. Whatever, I have a magnet that still jumps fast to the body right where my filler
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Tack Welded
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is, I think that counts as better than ok. I'm sure that it is still a real thin coat. Whew!
I mentioned before that I was troubled about the paint cost and being a perfectionist about it all is basically stifling me. I know that I
Ready
For Filler
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won't have the money to pay for the paint job that I want, so I've resigned myself to just spraying this thing the traditional black primer and get on with it. When I've got the money, I'll pop the windows out and have it sprayed right. In the meantime, I'll still have a cool ride that'll look downright evil. |
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