Punky Manor - Vintage Stock Car - Tribute Build

Body & Paint - Part 1

So the time has come to get the body panels installed on the race car and get some paint on the Tribute Torino. I have spent the past 5 years gathering parts, prepping parts for assembly, finding an engine (or two), rebuilding the inner structure of the car, the frame, the suspension, and brakes.

When I acquired the Torino it looked like it had experienced a pretty rough life. The entire passenger side was covered with bondo and had been partially stripped back to metal and had turned to rust. The drivers side looked a bit better but still had quite a few "issues".

After getting the car back from the local sandblasting shop, the real condition of the car was exposed and it looked pretty ugly. Both rocker panels looked like Swiss cheese, and the frame was pitted up fairly bad in several spots. 

I knew when I first looked the car over, I would need to replace most of the body panels. I ended up locating quite a few of the body parts from a guy on a Facebook Torino group who specializes in Torino parts. A few years back, my wife and I drove down to Kansas City to pick up a load of parts. Several of the other parts that I needed were found at a vintage Ford parts yard down in Hastings, MN. 

Here are some pics of the parts in the early stages of restoration.

 

 

I started the body work by cutting off all the inner structure of each panel to make them as light as possible. Then I stripped off as much of the old paint as I could. After the parts were brought down to bare metal I sprayed them inside and out with self-etching primer. I figured there was likely to be a fair amount of time between prep and final assembly, so I decided to spray all the parts with flat white primer.

In my next post I will show a few more details on the prep work that went into the panels before they were ready to be welded and or bolted in place.

Here is the collection of body parts in white primer, ready for final installation.

Take care for now...