a couple examples from my Chevy that are of the fixable type. About the only place I found exterior rust was under the chrome trim, where water collected. But this was primarily surface rust. I used a small, air-drive grinder to remove most of it, but this area had a hole in the lower right about the size of a 50-cent piece that needed a patch welded in.
With the rust ground off, weld ground smooth, one coat of high-fill primer, and a little catalyzed spot putty, sanded smooth, this is how the same area looked after a final coat of primer.
But you never know where you might find rust in a car. When I removed the interior panels, I discovered the left rear window channel drain tube had been plugged up, and the inner side of the trough was rusted completely through. Note the drain tube in the lower right, which had to be unclogged to start with.
Rust is either easier or harder to find, but, unless it’s simple surface rust, it’s badder than filler any day. If you can actually see rust bubbles—or worse, holes—in the paint, be warned that it’s the tip of the iceberg. Such body rust is coming from the inside out. If you can see any on the outside, it has to be worse on the inside…probably much worse. But, once again, many under-the-surface areas of car bodies are hard to access and these are the places where rust breeds and grows. Start by checking logical places for water to collect: the trunk floor, the interior floors (if you can lift the carpets), around exterior window channels (especially at the bottom corners). Open the doors and check the bottoms. If you can’t check interior floors from the top, crawl under the car and look at the floorboards from the bottom. This is especially important for cars that have ever lived in a cold climate where roads are salted (regardless of where the car might be right now).
The rusted area then had to be cut out with a cutting wheel on a die grinder. I scraped and wire-brushed as much as possible inside to remove more rust, but it was pretty inaccessible. So I resorted to liberally spraying the inside areas with a spray-can “rust converter” made by Permatex.
Then I cut and welded patches to fill the cutout portions of the inner panel. If you have rust holes on the outside of the body, the process is similar, but that’s really beyond the scope of this book.
Here’s an instructive example. My son was looking for a 1950 Ford to build. He found one in Ohio, and the owner proudly stated, “All new patch panels have already been installed, all around the car.” Being a Californian, this sounded good to me. All the body rust had been cut out and replaced with new sheetmetal. But a friend who grew up there said, “Whoa! If the car was so rusty that it needed full patch panels, you can bet everything under the car is rusted tight. You won’t get a nut or bolt off of it without a cutting torch. And you’ll find more rust in areas you never thought of.” Good lesson. My son bought a ’50 Ford from Arizona, and he’s still driving it. The cost of a trip to a drier, warmer area to look for a car could be well worth it in the long run.
Finally, there’s one phenomenon about buying hobby cars—or any cars—that I’ve never been able to understand, but it really is central to this book. Why buy a paint job you don’t want or aren’t going to keep? Especially in the rod and custom field, I see people pay the big bucks for a nice, finished car and then, a year or so later, decide they’d rather change the color, and the upholstery, and maybe the wheels and tires, to make it more “their car.” Well, they’re paying twice for all that stuff that was fine to begin with.
The point of this is to find a sound well-priced car with good potential that needs a paint job. You add your own paint and finish the car however you like it. That way you can pay about half instead of double, have the car look the way you really want, and have the satisfaction of doing it yourself. Somehow that sounds more sensible to me.
Further, the first thing that you should be suspicious about on any car you’re looking to buy is a fresh paint job. You’ve heard of “resale red,” and with any experience you can spot quickie cover-up paint that very likely hides a multitude of sins. But I’ve seen far too many high-dollar cars, of all types, with beautiful-looking—even show-winning—paint jobs that turn out to have a ton of filler under that shiny, smooth surface. They’re not all that way, of course. But production body shops, and even busy custom shops, know they have to get cars in and out quickly, and sanding filler smooth is a lot easier and faster than properly straightening, forming, or replacing sheetmetal. If you buy something with new paint (even a full, fresh coat of primer), you really don’t know what’s under it. If you buy something that needs paint, or still has all its factory finish on it, you have a much better idea what you’re getting.
Save an Old Paint Job
You’d be surprised how dead a paint job you can bring back to life. I’m not talking about making the car show-winning perfect. I’m talking about a car that someone has let go—left out to fade and oxidize—and all you want to do is make it shiny and nice once again. On the other hand, at concours shows you see old, original classics that have been meticulously taken apart, cleaned, and polished—both old painted and bare-metal parts—until they look just like new. You can do much the same thing to any old car, for nearly no investment other than time and elbow grease.
In the old days I heard of people oiling or waxing primer to make it shiny. If you ever intend to paint over it, don’t do that. Also, I’d see guys (especially lowriders) wax whatever paint was on the car, repeatedly, until it got real shiny. If they went through the paint down to the factory primer, that was okay. It’d be shiny, too. With the abrasive paste waxes of the day, you could shine up most any old paint job pretty quickly; the more you waxed, the shinier the car got. Here, we’ll do something similar, with more modern polishing products, and hope we don’t hit primer.
Another option, with the variety of catalyzed clears available today, is to scuff down and clear coat whatever you’ve got. That’s a possibility (even over primer), but we won’t delve into it here because it isn’t common; any scratches, blotches, or other irregularities in the underlying paint (including sanding scratches) not only show but are usually magnified. On the other hand, the big craze among the rod and custom crowd now is “patina.” Not only are worn, faded and flaking paint jobs prized (partly to prove that the car has old, original sheetmetal), but some people are actually “weatherizng” paint jobs to create fake (or “faux”) patina. Whatever. You’ll have to find some other book or magazine to teach you that.
We show more on spotting-in paint in following chapters, but let’s consider a vehicle that looks like it needs a new paint job, but might not. The car in question is a ’93 Honda Accord wagon that my wife bought, new. She took very good care of it for 200,000+ miles, including several cross-country trips (seen here somewhere east or west of Laramie), but it never once spent a night or day under cover—nor got waxed. The clear coat was getting chalky in places, but the metallic red hadn’t visibly faded—a testament to today’s factory paint jobs. When Anna got a low-mileage white Camry (which you see in Chapter 8), she willed this one to me, and I decided to see what I could do to fix it up without a full new paint job.
