The new arrival

Delivery of my new toy actually arrived a couple days sooner than estimated. She arrived after dark and was off loaded at work due to the length of time required to get her off the trunk and the space required to do so. Once I got her to her new home I went over her very closely and noticed what I thought were fish eyes in the paint. More on that issue later. At the time I thought no big deal, I'll take care of that when I redo the paint to get the stripe correct. Steve had the stripe extending a bit too far to the rear making the trailing edge of the stripe too long in shape, so I planned on correcting the paint to make the stripe more like the NIKE swoop as seen on the TV car.

MY CAR

TV CAR








I made a mental list of parts I needed to locate to get the car back to stock as well as more like the factory S&H cars. I needed to locate all the AC system parts forward of the firewall case, correct size slot mags, deluxe bumpers and the light group parts to start.

I decided the first course of action was to convert the interior over to black, so I proceeded to remove all the interior pieces, seats, carpet, trim panels and finally the headliner and sail panel trim boards. That's when the true cause of the paint "fish eyes" revealed itself.

At some point in the past my car had been involved in an accident that required a new driver's side quarter panel, outer wheelhouse and the interior bulkhead to be installed and the "fish eyes" weren't in the paint, they were in the BONDO that they used to relevel and reshape the roof!

My cars are stored and worked on at the local Dodge dealership, so I had the body shop manager come over and take a look at the problem. He said since I had the interior gutted out of the car already, if it were up to him, he would go ahead and repair the body so I wouldn't have to tear the car down twice. That made sense to me and I was also concerned about any other hidden areas of damage, so I decided to completely strip the body of all paint to reveal all imperfections. I'll go into a bit more detail in a later posting.

Here are a couple shots on her delivery and the problem area....






















ZEBRA 3 OUT