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After drooling over shaved engine bays, I decided to give it a try. I started by welding up the strut tower. Don’t judge my welds this literally is my first time using a welder lol.
I have to say there is a lot of work shaving the engine bay! Welding, grinding countless “refitting” and that’s all before laying the body filler. I just know it will be all worth it when I finished.
Beginners mistake I layed down waaaay to much filler. No big deal just took me longer then needed to knock it down. After hours of sanding and cursing I think I got to the point where I’m happy. I do plan on laying down a thin layer of light filler for final shaping and smoothing.
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Last edited by Destro Camaro; Mar 25, 2019 at 04:36 PM.
I think is a good stopping point for now. I still have to do the whole process on the drivers side. I figeured it’s best to do one side at a time. Hopefully I’ll learned from my mistakes and the other side will go a lot smoother.
lots of work. I agree, you used a LOT of filler. probably lots of sanding. you never want to go tooo thick with filler, or it will pop
I would consider pulling off the strut mounts before you spay any paint. if you mask them and then paint.. the next time you need to set alignment/adjsut them at all in any direction, you will expose unpainted surface under there.
Definitely going to take of the strut mounts before I paint. It would be pointless in my opinion to do all this work then mask them off. Still trying to figure out what color I’m going to paint the car. Stuck between “electric blue” and “sunset orange”
Definitely going to take of the strut mounts before I paint. It would be pointless in my opinion to do all this work then mask them off. Still trying to figure out what color I’m going to paint the car. Stuck between “electric blue” and “sunset orange”
That's alot of work. I would recommend for the effort you're putting in, if you're not going to remount the fluid tanks (since you filled the holes), flatten the mounting embosses out. they will stand out like a sore thumb if you smoothe everything out and leave them be. Persevere... engine bay sanding is a b---h.
If you make a couple cuts into the embosses shaped like this... >--< ... you can hand hammer/dollie them flat and weld up with no extra sheet metal and very little filler to finish smoothing.
I still have a lot of block sanding to do on the firewall, hopefully I wrap the engine bay up this next week on my days off. I having fun laying down body filler and watching things take shape, but I ready to move on to other parts of the car.
A word of caution you on using much filler on the wheel well/strut tower area and on the firewall. The firewall especially is extremely thin and flimsy, even more so since you enlarged the HVAC opening. The strut towers can flex during turning movements which could crack the filler-- one of the reasons that I'm using a strut tower brace. Some of the seams it looks like you may have just used the filler to blend them. You're better off blending the seams with the MIG gun and a grinder and then going over them with the filler instead of depending on the filler to do the entire job. As an example I dug up this picture and you can see that I was doing up to 6 passes in some areas on the strut caps. Depending on the gauge of metal composing the seams I usually did 2-3 passes with the MIG gun.
I also agree that you'll be kicking yourself later on if you don't remove the mounting tabs from the fluid reservoirs that were on the wheel arches.
I wanted to work on one side at a time, plus I had the firewall to deal with. I just started welding the strut tower over this weekend. Hopefully the other side goes smoother and faster.
It turned out ok for my first time welding and body work. I took a break on finishing it up once I primed the bay. My goal is to finish putting the car to together over the winter get it to where I can drive it and work out all the bugs. Then in the summer strip the car back down and send it off to be painted. I wanted to try to paint it myself but I think that is a little more then I can handle.
So , , Destro Camaro , whatever happened with the bracket you offered to sell me , and then you disappeared ? I understand things happen , maybe you couldn't find it or whatever , but the decent thing to do would have been to return my messages asking you about it , rather than ignoring me like you did .
Remember , YOU offered it to ME in MY thread , If you couldn't be bothered to follow through with it why did you offer to sell it in the first place ????
I just figured I'd post this as a warning to my fellow TGO members , in case you offer to sell anyone else something , that you may not want to be bothered following through with .....
Originally Posted by Destro Camaro
I remember when mine cracked that same way, it was a real bitch to find another one. I have an extra one if you are looking for one.
So , , Destro Camaro , whatever happened with the bracket you offered to sell me , and then you disappeared ? I understand things happen , maybe you couldn't find it or whatever , but the decent thing to do would have been to return my messages asking you about it , rather than ignoring me like you did .