Classic Auto Body Work & Body Restoration Planning

Posted by David C. Atkin in Wednesday, March 3rd 2010

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This can be a tricky part of the job, and it should always be the first part of the job, a good auto body restoration plan can make the difference between finishing the restoration project and not finishing it, and will definitely be the difference between getting right, or half right.

You’ve got to remember that the body restoration of the work is only about ¼ of the process, you should plan every step of the restoration down to the last nut and bolt, if your restoring a car you obviously don’t want it to look half done at the end of the process.

Now that we have waded through the concept of a body restoration plan, lets get to the nut and bolts of the process, the planning phase is about the same for every car, and for this article I will only cover the planning for the body work on the car.

First of all you need to take a visual inspection, or do a walk around as I like to call it, what you need to do to get it right is break out a notebook and as you inspect the car you’ll write down the things that you find so you don’t forget what you have found.

Keep in mind that a walk around is not a complete inspection of the body on the car, what you’ll be looking for is rust showing through, paint bubbling, dents, and poor looking body work in general, you’ll need to make a note of the things that you find.

This is the first step in making a body restoration plan for your classic car, the next thing that you’ll be doing is taking the inspection to the next level, during this part of the process you’ll be checking the door hinges, the hood hinges, and the trunk hinges.

What your looking for here is wear on the parts, as you open the doors if they drop when you open them the hinges either need to be replaced or have hinge kits put in, you’ll need to write this down in your notebook also.

Next look at the hood hinges, and the trunk lid hinges if you have one side of you hood that you have to push down for it to seat right this can mean bad hood hinges, or possibly they just need to be lubed, try that first, if that doesn’t work it’s time to replace them.

Usually the trunk hinges don’t go bad but it can happen, if the trunk is hard to open this usually means that the hings need to be replaced, these are that first things that you should look at as you begin to plan your body restoration on your classic car.

The next thing is the bumpers on the car, are they dented, is the chrome peeling off of them, look at pricing to replace them, or to re-chrome them, this is not rocket science it’s more like common sense, during the plan take you budget in to consideration.

Make sure that you keep you notebook handy, the next thing that you’ll be doing is crawling around on the floor to look at the things that you can’t see at eye ball level, here we’ll look at the valance panel, the rocker panels, and the bottom of the quarter panels.

You will most likely find some rust in these areas since they sit so low to the ground, you’ll need to determine if you dealing with just a surface rust, or body cancer, you can use a scribe, or a Philips screw driver to figure this out.

If you can poke your tool through the car body, you have body cancer, and this always means cutting and replacing body panels, there is no way around if you want to do the job the right way, you should also look inside the trunk, and engine compartment for rust.

Once you have checked out these things, you should be able to create a plan for the body restoration of your classic car, this plan should include parts that need to be replaced also, so keep that in mind also, if you follow these steps you should be able to develop a great plan for you body restoration.

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