Need help deciding on whether to go on with this car or not.

[Guest TegRacer324]

Alright this may get kinda long, but I need help on deciding whether I should go on with my car or not. I'm honestly not too experienced in restoring a whole car so I'm a bit iffy about making calls myself on whether I'm going to have to rip something apart or not. So I needto decide now whether I'm going to need to cut apart the whole car on a rotiserre and weld in new frame rails and floor boards and everything or whether I can get away with not ripping the whole car apart. Before I go on I'll just say there's more photos in my photo album as I'm not going to post them all up on here, but I'll post the ones I have specific questions on.

 

The first thing is the floor boards. Now there's a lot of rust on the bottoms of them. However when I take some sand paper to it there is metal under there. How do I go about fixing this? Take a sander to them and then coat them with something afterwards? Should I rip the seats and carpet out too to check them from the top? For reference:

 

However in back of that behind the seats some of the metal is thin and there are a couple of holes. I'm really not even sure if this is part of the floorboards or not so I was wondering if I should make patch panels for back there or whether or not if I bought floor boards they'd be part of it? Another picture for reference:

You can see the holes up there on the seam. Both sides are pretty similar not incredibly large, but not exactly thought easing.

 

Now for the frame rails. It appears that somebody threw some coating over them like tar kind of coating or bed liner stuff. I'm not sure whether this is from the factory or not. It appears that they don't have any rust on them from what I can see. I can bang on them with a flat blade screw driver and they sound pretty solid although they don't look too pretty.

 

The front of the frame rails are a bit more concering as on the passenger side there are actually some tiny holes in them. Is it possible to just replace the front of the rail?

 

And lastly I was just wondering what this is. It looks like on the edges by the floor boards there's something there that was either cut away or rotted away or a combination of the two. Anyone know what this is or whether I should be concerned about it?

Right at the top of the pic.

 

I know I have a lot of work anyway, but I was just wondering what someone else would do with this car. What steps would you take to restoring it and what should I check to see if I should scrap this car or not? Like what is something that is going to be so screwed up it's beyond repair? I got this car cheap and that's one reason I have it. I know somebody else who supposedly has a 280 with good floors and it runs. I know this is kinda long, but I figured I need to decide now before I throw any more money in this car and then find out later I need to junk it or something. Oh yeah and I was thinking SBC around 400hp for this car. So would you go on with this car or start looking at other ones? Any help would be appreciated as I'm kinda lost right now. Haha

[bjhines]

someone has been at that car with some sheet metal and a poor skill level...

 

The entire floor pan is one piece from rocker to rocker including the tranny tunnel... it has a seam along the front at bottom of firewall and a seam in the rear behind the rear seat rail...

 

Here are mine... original.. little rust...

 

 

 

[JMortensen]

Agreed. It's worse to find a car that's been fixed poorly than to find one that needs repair. That one has been fixed poorly, if that bird poop welding is any indication.

[AK-Z]

agree. walk away. Mine is in worse condition than that, but since no one has done repairs on it previous of me owning it, repairs are much more easier to do.

 

If you watched Mull's vids. Thats a good idea of what else you might find.

[Guest TegRacer324]

Yeah after taking a welding class and looking under there I kinda noticed that. I think whoever had it previously made a couple of welds to galvanized steel in the back to regular steel which also made me a little suspicious. Crap the things we learn too little too late. Haha son of a bitch.

[Guest TegRacer324]

Anyone else got any comments or suggestions?

[OlderThanMe]

buy it and burn it...

[Guest TegRacer324]

It's already been bought for a while. I guess burning is still an option though.

[OlderThanMe]

yeah...or if you have time and money you could out-do mull in restoration...

[v8wannabe2]

Spend a few extra bucks and get a less rusty one. It can be done BUT do you really want to put the hundreds of hours into it when $500-$1000 more would get you a far better body. My rule of thumb is that the rust you see on the surface is 3X worse when you start digging into it.

[mason4300]

if there are any parts in good condition left, keep all the good stuff and junk the rest. OR you could try and sell it to some other sucker on Ebay.

[Guest TegRacer324]

Yeah I dunno I'm really debating getting the fuel cell I have for it in there, making it look a little nicer and then selling it off to someone for a little more than I paid hopefully. It's just gonna be a long time finding another one probably. This one does run like a champ though suprisingly. I was really suprised when it started right up.

[Guest TegRacer324]

Alright this is a really dumb idea, but lets just say I'm dumb enough to try to fix this thing. I'm assuming I'd probably need to rip the floor pans out and the frame rails and replace them both. How would I check to see if everything is even straight now from the repairs done before? In other words how would I check to make sure it's not completely unsalvagable.

 

This is really just an idea as playing with the welder I think I've got kind of an itch now, but not sure how much of an itch.

[2126]

I don't even think OVERHAULIN would touch that one........find another chassis or you'll spend all your time and college funds fixing it!

[AK-Z]

Alright this is a really dumb idea' date=' but lets just say I'm dumb enough to try to fix this thing. I'm assuming I'd probably need to rip the floor pans out and the frame rails and replace them both. How would I check to see if everything is even straight now from the repairs done before? In other words how would I check to make sure it's not completely unsalvagable.

 

This is really just an idea as playing with the welder I think I've got kind of an itch now, but not sure how much of an itch.[/quote']

park the car on a level and consistent place, use a level to see if both front rails are level to each other then the trunk lid and deck area behind the seats. Then measure levels on rockers and look at variations to each other. Should tell you whether its straight.