I purchased the car off EBay in October, 2006.  The previous owner was a retired body shop owner who was preparing the car for his wife to drive.  He put new sheet metal on it, block sanded it once, stating the car was ready for paint; installed a 350 crate engine, new interior and convertible top.  It was not running at the time and needed misc. mechanical items done to it.  I was newly retired and needed a hobby, it didn’t seem like much work was needed.  Plus my son-in-law is a mechanic at a car dealership bodyshop and he offered to help me get the remaining work done at a reasonable price. 

I trailered the car home and after 3 months finally got a body shop friend from my son-in-law’s shop to look at it.  That was when the bad news hit !!  Essentially his assessment was the car, if driven down the street would break in-half when crossing the first railroad tracks.  That’s if the passengers didn’t fall through the holes in the rusted floors first.  The frame was extremely rusted with the body mounts gone, floors had severe rust holes and non-industry accepted methods were used to install all the new sheetmetal that was put on.  Essentially, the previous owner used all his experience to hide the major problems to get rid of it.  He mostly finished the interior, gluing in new carpet in the cabin and trunk.  He also exercised creative uses of expansion foam and heavy undercoating to hide the problems underneath.  He sandwiched on new metal over rusted old metal to save time and money.  Bottom line:  the recommendation from the friend was to dump the car as fast as I could! 

Well, the seller didn’t respond to my calls.  EBay was of no help and I didn’t feel I could unload the car on some unsuspecting buyer who might risk his family in it, so I decided to tackle the full body off restoration.  My son-in-law and I stripped the car down, shipped the body off to a restoration shop to have the floors and other things fixed while we built a new rolling chassis in my garage on a newly powdercoated frame.  We had the chassis done in 4 weeks and waited for the body.  As it turns out the restoration shop we choose underestimated the work to be done and really didn’t have the technical expertise to get the job done.  They sat on the car for 7 months and didn’t do much work.  Eventually my son-in-law’s boss, a very experienced bodyman, finally took pity on us and agreed to take over the project.  We retrieved all my car’s pieces and parts from the shop.  I also acquired another car to use for parts and got additional pieces from The Parts Place in Elburn.  After another 6 months and lots of $$$, the car is now painted and back in my garage.  We just put the dash in it in January, 2008, are finishing the interior, electrical and mechanicals.  The 4-wheel disc brakes and hopefully we’ll have it in running condition for summer.