72 Cutlass

My friend John asked us to help him out with his 1972 Cutlass convertible, and we were only to happy to help.

In need of a trunk floor, quarter skins and a few patches this car was not in to bad of shape.

We started with a sand blasting to reveal the trouble spots and it did not take long to find out the door would be a lot of work.

The trunk lid was from another car and while it fits this one very well the only issue we needed to address was the rounding of the corners.

This is very typical rust for a northern car, so many people ask me why do we bother working on cars this rusty. I tell them all the same thing, that it is not near as bad as it looks and the most importaint thing is to keep our classics on the road and not in junk yards.

Step two, cut away all the bad rusted metal and get to a clean strong point to build the car back from.

As you can see quite a bit of metal was removed.

Let the patching begin! The outer wheel houses were in need of replacing but they are also very difficult to remove completely. So I only cut away the bad parts and sectioned the replacement wheel house to match my cuts. Then I patched the lower sections of the inner and outer.

Before

After

Cut back to clean metal.

Welded into place and a nice fit.

Here we did some test fitting of the drop offs and patches to make sure everything would work well together.

Not to bad.

Now it was time to rust proof with some POR15.

We made sure to get the frame rails and rear axle along with the entire underside of the floor.

Here is a rusted spot at the back of the car in the trunk that would not be replaced with the new trunk floor. Time to make another custom patch.

Sweet... after the final paint you will never know it was replaced by looking at it.

We also added new cage nuts as the originals were really bad.

This was a 5 piece trunk set and had to all be welded together anf fit properly.

After grinding down the welds I put some primer to protect from rust. Once the proper splatter paint is applied it will look original.

The quarters fit fairly well needing only a bit of "hammer adjustments".