Below are a bunch of pictures of the restoration of my 68 442 Convertible. I have it posted on ROP but I know there are quite a few people who are here that aren't there.

I figured now that it’s finally painted & I probably have at least 6 months of work to go it's about time to do a progress thread (this way it looks like it went a lot faster than it really did :lol: )

I had everything that was rusted replaced by the time it went to paint. When I was done the following was replaced or rebuilt:
Core support under the battery, floors & floor braces (previous to me owning it), complete trunk & braces, ¼ drops, inner wheelhouse patches, outer wheelhouse completely replaced, rear ¼’s, re-build both front fenders, lower front cowl corners, front cowl under windshield all the way across, front frame mounts, cut out weak spots & replaced under both sides of the frame in front of the rear wheels, Completely new & rebuilt interior. Rallye Pac (still to be installed). Rebuild the entire dash wiring harness to stock & converted to Rallye Pac. New forward light harness & engine harness. Rebuilt rear light harness. Replaced rear power antenna. New rear end from Brian Trick (still to be installed). New convertible rear window (believe it or not the top and top frame was in great shape). I had all the stainless refinished, 15X7’s all the way around. Rebuilt engine from a 70 442 4 speed car. Rebuilt M-20 that I tripped over while looking at 68 parts in a guys basement in Roxbury MA that I ended up getting for free. I’m sure there will be more things as I remember them
So…..from the beginning:

Car on Lift where it was stored before I bought it (September 2003):


The interior loaded with all the crap from the car. Note the bumpers lying across the rear of the car. The body was disconnected from the frame. The ROPE is what’s attaching the body to the frame. This was a new Goodmark ¼ panel that had been lap welded. I later found a ton of rust between the laps in the panel so I cut through the lap & butt welded the entire panel.


A shot of the passenger ¼. I actually found a piece of a beer can riveted & bondo’d over. The panel was pretty straight but loaded bondo with rust underneath.



Disaster #1
The kid that towed this (the son of a friend) was nervous about flat bedding it with the frame only attached by rope so he threw straps over the whole car and ratcheted them down to the flatbed. Car bounced and…voila….caved in ¼’s on both sides just behind the doors where the straps were. This is the driver’s side where the Goodmark panel was. The passenger side which still had the factory ¼ fared much better.



I spent the better part of a year stripping paint. Mostly with a wire wheel but some places I used chemical stripper. There was so much bondo that the chemical stripper really wasn’t much good.


One of the first things I did was replace the trunk. The trunk pan fit pretty well but it was tough to get the trunk braces to line up correctly with the body mount holes in the frame. If I was going to do it again I’d try to fit the trunk braces before removing the body from the frame.



I tried to leave as much of the original panels as possible. This was one of the first things I tackled after the trunk (the floors were already in when I got the car). I fitted the panel too tight without much of a gap. The result was waviness & penetration that wasn’t great, but it was acceptable. The body/paint guy straightened it out but in hind sight I should have re-hung the panel.





The car came with new outer wheel houses but I fabricated all the rest of the patches for the inner wheelhouses. Like many cars, The ¼’s and outer wheel houses were bad but only the lower inner wheel houses needed work so I fabricated pieces for those.





I had a 2 car garage under my house. My wife’s car was on one side & I did all the work on this on the other. I moved her car out when I was painting but she’d get pretty pissed every time because the whole house stunk. I would never do this in a garage attached to the house again. I blocked the car up on 4x4’s & rolled the frame out to work underneath



About six months after I got the car I picked up this 455 4 speed motor from E-Bay. It was a big valve engine that hadn’t been apart except for the intake manifold & obviously the Holley carb. It was pretty clean but had a few valve hits from over-revving.



I went on vacation & dropped it off at my neighbor’s auto repair shop so one of his engine builder friends could take a look at it to give me an estimate. While I was gone he had it rebuilt……surprise

 

Here's a a continuation due to the 20 image limit

Over the next few years I did a bunch of rust repair & fabrication. Here are a bunch of shots of misc areas that I rebuilt including a fender inner brace.







The kid I bought the car from was going to convert it to an automatic so he cut out the whole floor included the 4 speed hump & tossed it….stupid. You can see the remains of the spot welded hump at the top. This was the only proof that I had that this was an original standard trans car. I don't know whether it was originally three or a four speed. Here’s what you do when you’re too cheap to pay $100 for a 68-69 four speed hump.





The entire frame, front suspension, and core support was coated in POR-15 when I got it. I hated the POR-15 on the frame so I used a combination of sandblasting & wire wheeling to roughen up the surface and remove rust. Then I shot the frame with Chassis Black.



I noticed a bubble on the core support in the POR-15 one day so I started to pull and the next thing I know it was peeled off everywhere (the kid I bought the car from hade POR-15’d the frame and core support. The core support was so clean underneath the POR-15 had nothing to stick to. I ended up painting this with Chassis Black too.


Eventually I got the whole car back together when I was still living in Massachusetts.



I fired up the motor in the summer of 2007 with help from a friend I met through ROP & my next door neighbor who owned a repair shop. It fired up fine, broke in the cam and took it for a spin around the block. It sat for another two years before we moved to Upstate NY. Here’s a shot of it just before I loaded it onto the trailer to take to NY. Bye Bye Boston……


Once I got to NY it sat for almost another year & finally went to a small paint shop in Newark Valley NY that advertised on Craigslist in March of 2010.
On the way there….Disaster #2. Car comes off the trailer.

http://www.realoldspower.com/phpBB2/...hlight=trailer
Here’s the landing zone:


Fortunately it was a warm spring day (the frost wasn’t out of the ground but there was about a foot of “fluffy” dirt above the frost), the car was going up hill, and I was very very lucky. Here’s the dig in the ground from the front fender when it went off the road into the ditch. It stopped about 15 feet from the telephone pole. There was minimal damage from the incident. I ended up replacing the front fender with another one I had so no time was lost.


The six to eight weeks in the body shop stretched to over nine months. I regularly visited but it didn’t make it go any faster.


Finally Paint the week of October 25th, 2010. Almost seven years from when I started.

 

It finally came home Sunday December 19, 2010, almost nine months after it left for it's 6-8 week paint job (that's pretty good from the horror stories I've heard though) I'm storing it at a friends house about a mile up the road. It was 9 degrees in the AM so there wasn't much salt being kicked up. I can't wait to start putting things back together. There's no heat in this garage so I'm going to have to make do with a torpedo heater. I think most of it will go back together in the spring when my wife gives up her spot in the garage at our house.

 

Nice work. It does take time too...Mine was supposed to be painted to-day but there was a delay....I've been waiting three and a half years...it will be a twin to yours (but auto)...good luck...Richard...

 

Looks great,
By the time that snow melts you should be ready to cruise!

 

nice job, way to stay with it. that car doesnt like to be towed does it?

 

Looking good. The years of hard work are starting to show the fruits of your labor. Congrats for sticking with it. I'm going into the third year of my build. It takes time especially if you want it done right. Hopefully, I'll be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel at some point.

Keep posting pics of your progress.

 

Congrats. Beautiful car. I'm having a red '68 442 restored, as well. Is the paint color on your car the scarlet red?

 

It took them four different mixes before they got it right. First they ordered the "factory" PPG "Matador Red Scarlet". It was closer to pink.

After trying a couple more test paints of the inside of the trunk lid eventually they did a high resolution picture of the original inside door (after buffing it out) and it's a pretty good match now.

This is a posting I made while trying to get the paint color right:
http://www.realoldspower.com/phpBB2/...hlight=scarlet

 

I stored it the whole winter. I somehow thought that if it was at a garage (unheated) right down the street from me I'd get some work done on it. I pretty much did nothing.....

I brought it to my house about the first week of April. It was much easier to work on here considering our garage is heated. Now "our" garage really means "my wife's" because we only have a one car garage & she gets it in the cold months. "Cold" to her is September to June so it took some negotiating to get the car here in April.

It took about 2 months to get it to where you see it now. I spent a lot of time installing trim, lining up body panels, lining up the hood. Installing new mufflers, installing a new rear end.

The body shop was supposed to line everything. It came back what seemed like, pretty good. Little did I know that the fenders weren't tightened at the heels. The first time I jacked the car up the fenders popped out of alignment, I opened the doors and crunch......, the leading edges of the doors caught the backs of the fenders. Oh well, they say the first scratches are the hardest to deal with. I spent a lot of time getting rid of the "68 driver's side droop". A lot of people say it's the core support rusting and sagging. I'm pretty convinced it's a crappy stamping job on the driver's fender. It was off almost 2" from where it naturally wanted to sit. As you can see I straightened it out pretty well. If anyone wants to know the secrets to getting them straight I've got a few tricks that worked well.

I put the new rear two weekends ago from Brian Trick. I punched it in the driveway today, definitely posi....

Last weekend and all last week and most of this weekend I installed the new convertible rear window and re-installed the old top. It's a big job. Not hard but very time consuming. A lot of putting together, realigning, tightening, & taking it apart again to start all over again. It didn't come out perfect but I don't plan to have it up much. It was going to cost me about $600 to have it installed by someone else. It's money better spent on other things to finish right now.

Now on to the wiring and interior

Enjoy.........I sure am

 

Mike,
It looks great! I'm looking forward to seeing it finished!

Steve

 

Looks awesome. Congrats on the hard work

 

WOW Mike,
I feel your pain brother! It sounds like you did all the stuff I have done to my 68 convt, quarters, floors, fenders, doors, wheelhouses etc. It looks great and is coming along nicely. I dont know if this link will work for you guys but you can see a lot of pics that look EXACTLY like what you went through(you may not want to re-live the nightmare!)
http://s296.photobucket.com/albums/mm193/Toms68442/

 

Unbelievable how similar the rust was. My windshield was slightly better than yours but everything else was pretty much the same.

BTW it looks from the pics in your sig that you haven't drilled the holes for the door trim yet. Make sure they line up with the fenders. The factory screwed this up on a lot of cars and mine was no exception. The passenger side is OK but the driver's side still isn't quite right even after I tweaked the hole locations

 

Fitting the carpet tonight. I found a 68 cutlass S parts convertible about 7 years ago. One of the things that came with it was a carpet in a brown box. The previous owner had taken the car off the road in 1976, stripped out most of the interior and put everything in an attic. The car sat outside to rot. I never opened the box figuring it was some piece of crap because the car was rusted beyond repair. Turns out I'm pretty sure the carpet is NOS. I also have an ACC replacement carpet that came with my 442. It a piece of crap compared to the original. When I first pulled it out I thought it was original because the Cutlass S only had 26,000 miles on it but there aren't any holes for the seat belt bolts (maybe they attach to the seat, I don't know bench seat cars). It was a bench seat car so it's not a perfect fit but it's a lot nicer than the repro one.

 

I took it for a 30 mile ride yesterday AM. It was about 75 degrees out. It ran at 180 the whole time. Great oil pressure. I still have to find a way to get a choke on it. The carb needs a few more tweaks to get it to idle OK. I haven't gotten it aligned yet but it tracks pretty well. It will go in for that this week.

 

The car turned out great.

 

Here's a few final shots in the front yard. Thank you everyone for the great comments. I took it to my 30th high school reunion this weekend. Everyone thought it was the same car I had in high school with a new red paint job. It's funny how no one seems to remember me rolling my blue 68 Cutlass Supreme during graduation week 30 years ago. Good thing.....

 

Wow looks beautiful my friend. I bought my 68 Cutlass S in 2008 and I'm hoping to have it on the road for June of this year (2012) It is a post car but i love the look anyhow. I just need to get the front bezels and bumper etc. finished then the interior dash and glass. Great write up I enjoyed it.

 

I figured it was time for an update. You'd think the story was over last year but it just never ends.

I wasn't happy because they burned through the clear in a few spots. Then I noticed what looked like small spots of overspray on the left rear 1/4. It wasn't a cheap $3000 paint job so I didn't expect to have to accept crap like that. I told the place that painted it and they said they'd take care of it. They offered to take it right back last year at the beginning of the summer or wait until fall. I opted for the fall so I got to drive it most of last summer. I brought it to them at the end of October for what was supposed to be three weeks. When they finally got around to fixing it (in March), I got a call saying there was a bit of a "problem". After touching it up (which I'm guessing required removing some trim and repainting the red in some bad spots and then clearing it) they apparently didn't clean the gun from a previous metal flake clear job because most of the outside of the car had metal flake in it from blending in the repair areas.

They ended up completely stripping all the trim off and repainting the entire car again, basecoat/clearcoat.

The new paint is a lot better than the previous job. I'm not sure what he did different but the clear isn't as "thick" now. It looks much more like an original lacquer paint job. I'm really happy they took care of me & it didn't cost me a penny extra.

 

Mike,

Glad it all came out ok! I'm looking at the finish line of yours for mine! I'm thinking about putting clear on mine too. I had a quick and dirty repaint when I bought it. The guy mixed in clear with the stock red and gave it a little pop. I want it stock but think a little clear will make it shine!

Craig

 

AWESOME.. Thanks for sharing this with us. You have my dream car.

 

Thanks,


One of these days I have to update all the pictures since the links seem to have died.


Here's a shot from this summer with droldsmoreland & I out together

 

Hi Mike,

How do I buy the part from you?

Jerry

 

Since this was brought to the top anyway.....


New shoes:

 

How the hell you doing buddy?
Those do look very sharp! Glad it all worked out for you on that deal

Brett

 

Thanks again Brett.

Yeah, I'm really happy with them. I put air bags in the rear too and with 12 psi the car finally sits right and doesn't look like it's taking a dump. The new JGC steering box is awesome too.

Unfortunately the Centerforce clutch feels like crap. The linkage feels like it's hanging up at the bottom of the travel and I haven't figured out why. I'm sure I'll figure it out when something breaks.

 

That pooping cat stance had always dtuck in my head too, using the larger tires in rear helped a little I bet. Power steering is problematic for 'feel' for me, I know I know...old man et al, but I like manual steering. But if you get one thats set up right, the feel being neutral is pretty cool.
Do you think it might be length of throw on the clutch, if its shorter than they intended then the mechanical effort may be greater