[joeyv69ragtop]

So it's been pretty slow going on the chevelle but I have a few updates.

I tore apart a spare set of door hinges from the parts car to rebuild. I used Tom's (BlueSS454) build thread on his gold convertible as the basis for my rebuild.

Here's a few before pics of the hinges.

Lower Left:

IMAG0084 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Lower Right:

IMAG0083 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Lower Right:

IMAG0082 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Both Lowers:

IMAG0081 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Both Uppers Disassembled:

IMAG0080 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Lower hinge with a late model chevy truck door hinge spring.
The truck hinge spring is slightly longer but as you can see, with the
door hinge spring compressor tool (not pictured) I was able to test
install the larger truck spring in the chevelle lower hinge.

Chevelle hinge with a Chevy truck spring. by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Both Uppers, Rebuilt. These were stripped to bare clean metal using varous techniques (electrolysis, chemical stripper, dremel) painted with black epoxy and rebuilt with new pins and brass bushings from ground up.

IMAG0089 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

I've got the lower hinges disassembled and mostly cleaned up. Of course I wasn't wearing eye protection when using the dremel to clean them up and I had to take some time off from the hinges due to having 1 eye doctor scrape my eyeball first with a cotton swab, then a metal hook. After that a second eye doctor used his own dremel to grind the rust halo out of my eyeball where I had managed to get a piece of metal stuck. Currently I am suffering with reduced vision in my left eye and occasional double or triple vision in my left eye. I'm hoping as the eye heals it will be restored to the same vision as my right eye.

[joeyv69ragtop]

I've also been working on the SS hood I got from another member for cheap because the bracing had been cut out for a high rise intake.

Following the advice in this thread by tmcmillan5 I have started the process of repairing the damaged hood bracing (or frame as I will refer to it in the rest of this post)

Unlike Tony I am fortunate enough to have a malibu hood to practice on before separating the frame and skin of my SS hood.

First order of business, pop all the spot welds holding the flat skin to its frame.

Here the hood is upside-down on a cart and the spot welds along the front of the hood have been drilled with a blaire spotweld cutter.

IMAG0093 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's a close-up of the drilled out spotwelds on the front.

IMAG0092 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's an action shot of my dad taking a turn with the spotweld cutter on the driver's side of the hood. You might be able to sneak a peek of my niece holding the work light.

IMAG0094 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

After we got all the spotwelds drilled out, we put a little heat in the frame using a torch (heat gun MIA or busted) in the area where the skin and frame are glued together. While moving the torch to evenly heat the frame I used light pressure with a body spoon to separate the frame from skin. The adhesive seemed to all pop loose all at once.

Here's the frame we removed from the malibu hood.

IMAG0100 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr


IMAG0101 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Now that we felt comfortable separating the skin and frame on the malibu hood we carried out the same procedure on the SS hood.

Here's the frame we extracted from the SS hood. If you look close you can see a little bit of it missing.

IMAG0102 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's a shot of the SS skin after removing the frame.

IMAG0104 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

We noticed a major different in the frame of the malibu hood and the SS hood, and that was these extra brackets that are spot welded to the frame to support installation of the SS hood louvers.

IMAG0103 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Each is held on with 4 spot welds. I only had to drill 5 of them, the rest broke. Here's a shot of my holding one of the brackets in place on the good frame we pulled from the malibu hood.

IMAG0108 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

And here's an initial test fit of the malibu frame in the SS skin. Looks pretty darn good to me. You can see the malibu skin leaning off to the left side of the pic.

IMAG0105 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

At this point we just need to clean the SS skin and Malibu frame down to clean bare metal then hit them with a coat of black SPI epoxy, weld them together, then touch up with epoxy after we clean up the welds.

[DUKE 69]

Looks good, Joe! Be careful with your eyes....you only get two! Nice to see you at the show last week. Now get that thing done so we all can see it!

Duke

[DFER]

Joey:

Looking GREAT!! Take every precaution with your eyes and lungs when working on cars. We are not superman!

Durand

[Elcoman]

Great pics!

[joeyv69ragtop]

Originally Posted by DUKE 69

Looks good, Joe! Be careful with your eyes....you only get two! Nice to see you at the show last week. Now get that thing done so we all can see it!
Duke

Nice seeing you too Duke. Hopefully I'll stick around a bit longer next year. Maybe bring the rolling chassis out to the show

Originally Posted by DFER

Joey:

Looking GREAT!! Take every precaution with your eyes and lungs when working on cars. We are not superman!
Durand

Thanks for the reminder about the eyes, guys. I made sure to keep glasses on the whole time we were working on those hoods. It was pretty scary sitting there while the doc was drilling into my eyeball, it's not like I could even look away! haha. It's just about back to normal now. Got a follow up appointment on Monday.

Originally Posted by Elcoman

Great pics!

Thanks, Jay! Can't wait to make some more progress so I have more to show you.

[joeyv69ragtop]

Hey Jay are you inspired to work on your Elco yet Elcoman? Or are you too busy flipping houses?

[joeyv69ragtop]

Got some more pics of the hood in progress. Getting the underside cleaned up. Rubberized undercoating does not make me happy.

IMAG0155 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's a shot of the some of the pitting, there is a pinhole in there somewhere. so hard to see.

IMAG0002_COVER by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

This is the worse hole. I put my hand behind it so you can see. Just look for the flesh colored part lol.

IMAG0152 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's another hole.

IMAG0153 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

[joeyv69ragtop]

So we finally got the hood mostly in epoxy!

Here's a shot of the frame and the extra parts that weld on to the frame for the SS louvers.


IMAG0264 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's a shot of just the skin. This is the backside of the skin. We still need to strip the sides and top of the skin and get some epoxy on those areas.


IMAG0263 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr


Since I was concerned about warping the metal and I wanted to save this hood we decided to fill the pits and pinholes from the underside of the skin with rage gold. Once we get the top and sides in bare metal we'll do any additional filler work on the underside and respray the whole skin.

[Smittie]

Awesome work, looks like fun! Gonna be soooooo nice when done .

[joeyv69ragtop]

Originally Posted by Smittie

Awesome work, looks like fun! Gonna be soooooo nice when done .

Thanks, Gary, it's been mostly fun so far. I didn't realize how much work went into stripping every nook and cranny of a hood to bare metal.

Your ride is looking great! Can't wait to see it all trimmed out!

[joeyv69ragtop]

I just about had a heart attack and nearly crapped my pants at the same time!

We've been working towards getting the body ready to accept the new 1 piece floor/brace/rocker combo from dynacorn (purchased through eckler's)

We cut out what was left of the old floor and braces. welded in some supports. then we just stood around lookin' at i for a while. Tom's thread is helpful but it's a different story looking at Tom's stuff and working on my own.

Tempers got the best of us and we worked in silence for an hour or so as we tidied up here and there and did some prep on the SS hood (we still haven't put it back together yet)

Then dad grabbed the reciprocating saw and hacked out the driver side rocker! I nearly ***** myself and my heart was pounding a million miles a minute!

Finally making some progress though!

[joeyv69ragtop]

Here's a shot of me (sort of) inside the chevelle for the first time in my life!

IMAG0353 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

At that point we had taken advantage of a huge man-sized hole that had rusted through the floor to get somewhat inside the vehicle so we could attack it with tin snips and reciprocating saw.

I swear there used to be a complete rocker here!

IMAG0376 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here you see a shot where the rear of the rocker used to attach to the quarter, wheel well, etc. Used to.

IMAG0375 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Here's a shot of that brace everyone is telling me isn't OEM for a '69.

IMAG0374 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

And here's a shot of the passenger side that still has the rocker intact.

IMAG0377 by unclejoeyv, on Flickr

Hope to have some more to show you soon!

[shadowgray396]

Nice work, looks like a great project.

[Malibulvr]

Looking great, glad your still working on that sucker, I still haven't touched mine, LOL. There seems to be a bunch of white powdery stuff blocking my door, strange...