other areas. One important fact to keep in mind is a restoration shop will always charge you more for a project you started and didn’t complete than one that was brought to them from the beginning. That is even assuming you can find a shop willing to take on your already-started project.
Where to Start
We are going to begin with the assumption you are doing a concours-quality body-off-frame restoration. If your plan is something less, you can adjust your plan of attack accordingly.
Once you begin your project, get organized. Tag and/or bag every piece you remove along with a note of when in the process it was removed, so you can reinstall the pieces in correct order. After you reinstalled the dash assembly is not the time to remember you need to replace/repair the heater controls or the radio. Get a quality digital camera and document disassembly details with photos. Download them to your computer after each work session and note what you did and any difficulties encountered in the day’s work. In six months or a year, when you are putting it back together, you will forget something or misremember how it came apart. I also make separate files for the photos to make them easier to find when needed, such as body, chassis, drivetrain, interior, etc.
Lastly, I cannot emphasize enough to save all of your old parts until the restoration is complete. Many times, I refer back to the original part when I receive a replacement or donor-car part. This will ensure that what goes back on the car will be similar to what originally came off. You may also be able to use parts of the old part if needed.
Even if you plan on farming out the entire process of restoring your Chevelle, you should be aware of the time, effort, materials, etc. that your selected shop must invest in the restoration. While the factory could build a complete car in four or five days, it took hundreds of employees at numerous subassembly stations to put the car together. Quite a number of those major parts, such as driveline components, came pretty much assembled by scores of other employees at other plants.
The assembly plants did not have to worry about patching rusted body panels, stripping old paint, tearing out old interior and wiring, or waiting for a third party to complete the assembly of a major component. A concours restoration can take months, even years, to complete from chasing down those hard-to-find correctly dated parts that were changed and/or lost long ago to the quality of a small team of experts to assemble the car and, last but not least, to your finances.
CHAPTER 3
BODY DISASSEMBLY
Overcome the urge to dig right in and start unbolting pieces; get organized up front. Have a general plan of attack for the day. If today’s task is to disassemble the front sheet metal, have a place in mind to store the hood, fenders, bumper, radiator support, etc. beforehand. These large items can be difficult to store due to their size, and keeping them out of the way once they have been removed can be a challenge. Protect them from warpage; do not lay fenders on their sides, as they tend to flatten out over time. I buy the cheap $25 body-panel stands and set them on there. Take care that your hood and other body panels are not sitting on a wet or damp garage floor; this will only add to your rust issues. Take care of the hood corners.
Large plastic dairy crates are great for larger heavy items but tend to gather dust when stored for a time. Heavy-duty boxes will help with dust issues, but you cannot see what is inside the box. Be sure to label boxes clearly. I find that those large plastic totes are the best and are not very expensive. I then tag them with pieces of tape and separate them by category: body, interior, chassis, engine, etc. This makes it much easier when it comes time to reassemble the car, as you grab only the tote and its parts for the area you are currently working on.
The interior needs to be completely gutted along with all wiring removed and any mechanical attachments, such as steering linkage, transmission linkage, etc., removed, as you see here. Two heavy-duty bumper jacks are used here to lift the body from the frame, but any safe method you have available to you will work.
Clear plastic bags can be used for the smaller items such as nuts, bolts, alignment shims, etc. Be sure to note which side (driver’s side versus passenger’s side) with items such as fender alignment shims. Assuming the body panels were hanging nicely on the car when you disassembled it, I like making a shim map showing the location of the shims and what overall thickness was present in that area. This will give you a starting point come assembly time.
With camera, bags, and a marker in hand, it is time to get started. Unless you have a dozen friends and a camera crew filming everything, do not expect to have your car stripped in an afternoon like you will often see on television. Take your time during disassembly as you photograph the steps and mark and bag trim pieces, screws, bolts and nuts, etc.
Removal Methods
There are two ways to attack a restoration depending on your skills, space, access to specialty equipment, or just your preference. Is the body going to be removed from the chassis? Some prefer to do bodywork with the body on the chassis, and some prefer to remove the body as quickly as possible and either put it on a rotisserie or a donor frame, or just lift the body and support it with 55-gallon drums and 4×4s for support.
Two-Post Lift
One way to lift the body off the chassis is with a two-post lift, a pair of large end jacks, or even an engine hoist or two.
It is always a good idea to temporarily weld in some square tube bracing if you are taking the body off the chassis. This is especially important on a convertible, as the body will flex and make your assembly that much more difficult.
Hoist
Another way is to use an engine hoist and lift the front and rear of the car. From there you can transfer onto a jigging cart, a donor rolling frame, the 55-gallon drum/4×4 method, or simply homemade sawhorses.
Since this is a convertible body, extra bracing should be temporarily welded at critical stress points of the body to keep it from bending during removal. This needs to be done before the body is removed from the frame. Once removed, the body can be attached to a rotisserie jig for easy access.
This convertible body, properly braced and off the frame, illustrates the amount of materials that should be removed from the body and interior components before the body is removed from the frame. Everything you can remove from the interior prior to lifting the body off is less that you have to deal with once it is off.
This is one of the preferred methods of lifting a body off a frame because it is quick and easy. It is always a good idea to have a rotisserie jig or some stand ready to support the body once you roll the chassis out from underneath. Sometimes you just have to do what you can and use the tools available to you at the time.
If you are on a tight budget, one storage solution for the body is homemade sawhorses. This alternative works pretty well, is inexpensive to build, and still gives you access to do some cleanup work. If you need to replace sheet metal or quarter panels, this may not be a viable solution for
