2006 Impala SS Restoration Underway
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ส.ค. 2024
- Just getting started, digging into the hole, discovering everything that's wrong and forming a plan to make repairs. It's either restore it or replace it, there is no in between unless you just want to quickie patch it and sell it. If you have a unibody car driven in rust belt conditions for ~17 years this can give you an idea what might be hidden inside a car that only seems to have a couple small rust spots on the outer body at first glance.
Of course none of this comes as a surprise to me, I have been aware of the condition of this car and I knew what to expect going into it. Getting the car on a lift and inspecting the underside can reveal a lot more than the couple small rust spots you might see on the outer body.
But after a shop does a quickie patch job and repaint on the outer body, a good wash on the underside and a thick coat of undercoating will temporarily hide all the horrors underneath long enough to sell it as a clean used car. Even a savvy person can't know every problem hidden deep inside without tearing the car apart. If the car has been driven a decade or more in the Rust Belt, you can assume there is more damage than meets the eye, because the piss-thin dip primer from the factory does not protect the metal any longer than the 5 year warranty period and there are hidden areas that are almost impossible for the consumer to reach to apply protective coatings without first totally disassembling the entire body and chassis to a bare shell, and nobody wants to do that.
This job will take a ton of labor, but when the body is repaired and all welded back together it will have very robust coatings thoroughly applied to all hidden areas. It will be better than new, and better than what can be applied by the average consumer to an assembled car.
Whew! Too much for me, KUDOS to you and your efforts. Rust is the toughest.
I can see a 96 but a 2006 must be sentimental value
You're right but that's not the only reason. Yes it's been a good car for me and I like it but I can also understand it ain't everybody else's idea of a keeper.
The other reason is I have only 2 choices for transportation: either can I buy something new or keep what I've got. I don't want anything new.
Everybody has this holy grail idea that they will find a clean no rust low miles southern owned well maintained used but not abused version of what they want, and for the right price. Sure you will ...
Then if you go for a "restored" version of your holy grail car you pay top dollar for a flipper special with a pretty paint job and plenty of textured undercoat to hide its secrets.
As for me I have chosen to stick with the sure thing because I know better. Even if I found my elusive dream holy grail used car it will have to come all apart and be restored anyway, because I guarantee it is slowly rotting away somewhere inside that you can't see.
I'm the original owner of this car, I know everywhere this car has been and now I'm in the process of knowing ALL it's secrets. I like driving something I know intimately.
And even if I bought something new it would have to come all apart to be properly rust protected anyway, or else it will be gone in 10 years. This in addition to car loan payments and owning something impossible for me to service that will by design become too expensive to own when the warranty expires.
I also have a '68 Camaro on my to-do list. I don't foresee any criticism on keeping that one, lol.
But first I have to worry about transportation before the toys.
Btw I've seen restorations of some pretty odd cars that I personally wouldn't have any use for, but once you've done some of this kind of work on your own stuff you can understand somebody else's odd choices and appreciate the work that goes into it.
@@onemoremisfit yeah I had a 1975 Chevy Dually with a crazy amount of rust and everybody in the family wonder what I was doing but I ended up patching in a lot of panels a lot of filler and flat black paint ended up selling it to somebody that needed it