Learning Old School NASCAR Bodywork: My First Time Using Bondo With Lessons From an "Old Timer"

I'm not like Bob Ross you look like Bob Ross well it's time to start something that I've never done before and that is Bodywork we're doing Bondo on these seams now I have consulted with uh you know some old timers that used to work in cup garages and stuff and how they used to do this I'm going to use the same sandpapers and follow their method do what they say have a strong attention to detail and it should work out pretty good so let's get going you can see we're getting down to some of the old black paint we must have been erect or something if there's a big fold under here I'm gonna clean out a bigger area in here and scuff it up make sure whatever I put in here doesn't fall back out sorry if I sound fine I'm trying to talk with this thing over my face this is one of those jobs where I really don't want to stop working but I'm going to kick myself if I don't film enough Clips during the process of doing it I'm just using a little air powered this wheel angle grinder with some 80 grit on it to knock the Bondo old Bondo off and clean up the metal underneath it because this car sat with a half unfinished body for maybe 12 years had a lot of surface rust on it so I gotta make sure that's fresh bright scuffed up so the Bondo I put on here does not fall off I love this stuff it's like archeology I'm using regular 3M Platinum filler here and I've never mixed you know body filler bottle no whatever you want to call I've never done this before I had quite a rude awakening I'm going to put a little bit too much of the blue activator in there and I'm spreading it around then it turns into clumpy goo after like 30 seconds I'm like crap this sucks because it was really hot outside when I was doing this and definitely wasn't going to do it inside because the shop would get so freaking Dusty you'd never recover from that well now I got it spread it occurred to me I didn't have a plan for a second camera position and this stuff dries really quick so I just did it pretty much just waiting for it to get to the dry enough to where I could sand it try to spread it as nice as I can to make the sanding easier but you know sometimes on some weird stuff here it just doesn't work so a little more time with the same table now I gotta prep these seams in the front here I already sanded off all the surface rust of the main surface and this is what the fabulous process of de-rustifying all that sheet metal looked like but now I'm digging out the surface rust in the seams you can kind of see they're brownish and dark in there same thing the same 80 grit pad I was told to turn it sideways and kind of let it ride around in there to get that brown stuff out because the seams on these cars like to lift out over time I'm sure you've seen that if you've been up close to basically any old stock car uh there's there's always seams lifting or splitting somewhere because they just wobble around so much so we're doing what we can to prevent that from happening now later in the video you'll see Joey Britt the guy we met who owns the old stavola brothers shop who was a body guy for a long time does composite molds now he comes and helps me and I get to watch him spread the Bondo and see how much he uses and what he does so just take note of how I'm doing this now with no prior knowledge versus how it gets done later in the video after I get to watch him do it in front of my face and really see how it goes like I'm being real conservative here and only using just barely enough just to fill the seam I'm kind of like you know almost like doing drywall you just put it in there and wipe it off and uh I think it's kind of funny how much ends up actually being on here by the time we're done I really didn't accomplish anything doing this little amount that you're watching right now so now the stuff that I did first is not hard yet but it's cured enough that I can take this 36 grit and knock off the high spots before they get really hard and then they're harder to sand and then by the time I finish with this and I can do that area and that area and then by then the first area will be ready for the 180 grit to make it smooth anywhere to point now it is still kind of sticky but you cannot high spots that's really easy right now see that's about as far as I'm going to take it because once again I had a bad habit of doing too much with this and then I had to sand too much off to get the lines out and then it was too low so this is just for like like the high high spots big bumps like this and once this is all sanded I fully anticipate this area to be about half is what it looks like now but I'm gonna make sure I had enough on there that I could feather out to be smooth because what we're told is that you don't want to have a solid Edge it has to be feathered like this because if it's a solid Edge it won't stick it'll lift like this down here this is borderline and this is better and when I'm also putting a lot more effort into the nose and tail of this car than it really needs to be for what I'm doing with it because there's a 95 chance somebody or me is going to knock the front end off of this car during a race it's short track racing but because of that I want to make this really nice so we can make a mold of it with Joey and then if flash wins somebody slash me knocks the front end off this car I can have another one out of fiberglass waiting to go for it and I won't have to you know English wheel fenders or anything it just kind of fix it easier almost like a late model um and if somebody else in the series has this type of body then I have a solution for them because they don't make these nose pieces anymore you can see that the black part is a mold and the metal parts are obviously hand fabricated so there's a lot of different layers that go into the front end of a old stock car I've been working on this body for a couple days now and we're about to learn something from a pro you might remember Joey Joey Britt he owns the stavola brothers building that's how we met him [Music] see I've been scooping it out of the jar so I already learned something I'm interested to see how you mix it because I haven't really found a good way to do that quickly yeah I'm not like Bob Ross you look like Bob Ross I can't I don't have the muscle memory built for that yet Joey's worked for a lot of places including Tex Pals AJ Floyd back in the 80s uh he worked at Rao she works at RCR for a long time had his own business doing bodies for all kinds of different teams he's seen it all I know a lot of people watching this are probably from Streetcar world and they're like oh there's so much Bondo oh I can't believe you do that well this is this is normal for this stuff it's fun I didn't say it in there it'll pop out yeah he did a really good job you would get a job doing because that's what they want to see no bonding because it's a lot lighter so I could have been hired back in the day you could go get a job now probably do you hate doing it or do you like doing it uh it depends what kind of mood I'm in it's kind of fun it's fun it's not fun whenever the sun's beating on it and you can't mess with it for a while and it starts to get all clumpy while you're trying to spread it well most of the time you don't have to do it outside like that yeah there's like certain projects where if it's like nuts and bolts and someone designed it stupid then you're just mofoam to yourself because somebody else made your life hard with this you you make the rules it's more obviously not wasting them it's more artistic and less uh black and white I guess this is a treat whenever I use this anymore this is free almost you know three dollars and it'll last forever this is a wood rasp is what it is huh look old school body shops there were piles of these everywhere so they didn't use up sandpaper yeah you know you can just fill in your lower spots like you've already got all the low spots filled in and then you just work up from your lowest spots that's kind of what I was going for here because I know that I know that this is a manufactured piece so my line should be about the same the whole way across theoretically where you get up there and it's going to be wavy because it's like a piece of Steel whoever hung this sheet metal is as good as you can get you know what I mean whoever did it was an experience that's what makes this easy it's gonna do a pretty good job I'm interested to see how you do this part here yeah what you normally do is just uh put masking tape on the hood itself and just squeeze you right down in the hole then you take it out and take a piece of sandpaper clean it hmm and some people will take put tape on the if you got a big gap a nasty one you put tape on that fill it for a bond over just drop the hood and then ease it up you know shave it off and get it out before it gets too hard huh yeah if you got a nasty fit that's a good way of doing that so you like the cheese grater method over using one of these yeah you can just let it ride along and put the sauce off of the high spot and you keep doing this and not even use any sandpaper until the very last and you have to be scraped again but so you did some of the first downforce bodies that Roush didn't you I worked on them yes I worked with Troy Martin uh here's the shop Steve meal that's who we all work for and then uh Troy Martin was a fast Prof guy PST and Mark did those first down four stars I guess so does the cheese grater almost kind of give you a low spot to just like let it let the squeegee ride on it instead of scraping it all away yeah the I guess you just you try to fill in the Low Places until what little did a high high you put on you try to put as little as possible and you razor blade it right when it gets just right you'll run a razor blade this little Bush that lives right over here what this right over here he's coming up Bob Ross oh oh you're doing I don't know what you said this is a little you watch Bob Ross oh yeah should I have used tape on the fender seam or not because the hood needs to be built up a little bit to match the fenders still kind of been a long time since I did this stuff reminds me that the stuff that used to take Impressions at the orthodontist and hopefully she'll rise up out of there and clear put it on the engines or stay away from it for a little while let it get hard at least they're good she used to smoke a cigarette guys Logan is out of town this week she's visiting her family that means I gotta make my own food reminds me of the olden days when I do that and I wasn't very good at it because I didn't know where to get it I didn't know how to shop for meat before Logan I certainly didn't know how to cook it if you have those same two problems I'm going to help you solve both of them right now the most important one is good chop so we got our chicken breast here from the good chop package and we're gonna cook it so put some butter and water in the pan put some seasoning on there this is really the only thing I know how to do and just like that we got good chicken good job has something for everyone whether it's chicken beef ribeye sirloin filet wild caught salmon this chicken breast is free range and organic I eat a lot of chicken and I have for the last eight years that I've been going to the gym five days a week this is some top shelf stuff all products are sourced from the USA good job especially Prides itself on sourcing beef that comes with no antibiotics or added hormones ever you know your body's a lot like a race car if you race car and you put regular 87 octane in it when it needs some you know leaded 110. it's gonna run like crap and you're not gonna get anything out of it and you work the same way you eat good food you will feel good you will be more productive you'll be happier on the Living testament to all of those things go to goodchop.com YouTube and use code stapleton120 or click the link in the caption below to get 120 off your first four boxes today it would help us out if you just click on it and browse around see what's on there go to goodchop.com YouTube and use code stapleton120 or click the link in the caption below to get your 120 off your first four boxes today right to your doorstep no grocery store hassle well it's a couple days later now got a phone call from my dad that said he was going to be driving through here that's what we were doing and I said you want to spread some Bondo because that's what we'll be doing and he knows how to do that so this is on camera this is like the first time you've ever like directly helped me work on a car isn't it you help work on your car yeah probably because I've never done anything that was in your wheelhouse but now we are because he used to do this stuff yeah and I'm winging it when was the last time you spread Bondo on something oh Lisa's car when she hit the garage wall you didn't have to put the Bondo on when she hit that bear yeah she says it was a bear I think it was a dog this time because it's hot outside and he doesn't want to be outside we're going to do the spreading and cheese grating part in here and then do the sanding last outside because if you notice before in the video I was doing a spot and then sanding it and then doing a spot and then sanding it and then whenever Joey came over here he would just spread it cheese grate it spread more over it cheese grated and then Lee he didn't he didn't get dirty at all until almost the very end so I thought huh maybe there's a reason he does it like that between my dad helping me and Joe is helping me I worked on this thing for probably a day and a half but I just forgot to film it honestly like once I got so far into it I was thinking I just want to get this done it was fun at first and then like yeah I just wanted it to be done and it didn't occur to me when I put the GoPro on the garage door that that pole was blocking part of what I was doing but I kind of worked on the left side and my dad worked on the right side and it was a pretty productive day although even though we use the cheese grater it made a big mess in the shop I can give my dad a hard time about that because I was sweating it out and doing it outside and he didn't want to be uncomfortable and uh I don't know back when I was building the Escalade for drag week in 2018 I was just sweating my face off in there every day all summer he comes in probably a week before drag week and it's you know 85 90 humidity 90 degrees outside Pennsylvania just like absolute dog days of summer there and he walks in and he's like this is what you've been doing every day and I got like a rag handy all the time to wipe sweat off my forehead so it wasn't drip on what I'm doing I'm like yeah this is what I do every day he left and came back with a AC window unit which I got to use for about a week doing it this way made my life significantly harder because like we talked about earlier in the video you want to cheese grate it and sand it while it's still kind of soft and when that by the time we were done with this the top layer of the trunk and stuff seams that we were doing had gotten hard hard so we were completely done with this I pushed it outside and I did all the da in because he didn't want to get dirty and there's only one da so I did it to my car I should do it and uh it took a lot longer than some of the other stuff because it makes a big difference when you don't get to the filler before it cures it's very hard and that's when it's not that much fun but what we do before painting it is uh the first step of sanding I'm using 180. and then before painting the car I went over the whole thing with 320 and that includes the side of the car that was still orange because this car is getting wrapped so we're going to spray it with a flat black epoxy primer like PPG shopline stuff that way when we put wrap over it and peel the wrap up it doesn't the paint won't come up with it that's uh pretty much all we're going for because if it's wrap it's easier to fix it and it's going to be kind of the same color as the Escalade so it'll be fun layer T's greater layer cheese grater has been much easier it's almost like Joey knew what he was doing this part's going to be fun because there's a big dip right here on the trunk that'll be nice nice thick spot and then when we're done with that we'll fill the same right here and then roll it outside and da all of it at once that way I like that like what it looks good um yeah this this big Center section in the middle we had to put here because the inner bracing of the trunk has rivets in it and I really don't know what those three little holes were for may have been for some type of locating antenna like jigs listen to music maybe well it was just working on the car here and it occurred to me that I had not picked up the camera in quite a while throughout this process been working on this thing a lot and honestly it's probably nicer than it needs to be for what it's doing it's probably going to get some dents it might get completely destroyed I don't know but I know that I can take pride in doing what I felt was a good job before that happens if it happens it may never happen if it doesn't happen we have a really nice car to look at but what I'm doing now is I'm wiping off all the dust and stuff with some wax grease remover using these blue shop towels because they don't leave lint you know this is going over scuffing everything I gotta take this stuff off you know like find a dent in the hood so I fixed that went over the front and because we're going to make a mold of this I put some more filler in here because it was kind of flat it went later so I filled this in and kind of radiused it so it was nice that way when the headlight decal is on there it'll be a nice headlight shape I guess and then the mold that comes of this will look nice when it is made into a whole piece thing because we're going to make the mold to about up here that way if the front gets knocked off of this thing I don't have to worry about this tricky part of the fender it'll be a lot quicker just to Loop in you know kind of put it on there like a late model you know got the fender smoothed out this part needed some help again most of the cars they don't you know they got dancing dings and whatever but I want it to be nice so it's gonna be nice get up in here got the crease on the a-pillar nice and smooth got this flat not gonna paint the roof leave that the way it is we'll just wrap over it partially because I want to leave this orange vinyl here I think it's a neat little piece of the car's past and if it doesn't have to come off then we'll just leave it there the B post here needed a good bit of help and just now feeling this I have to hit this with some 320 it's still rough it's kind of hard to see what you have sanded and what you haven't sanded it went overall with 180 first and then before the primer goes on doing the whole car with 320. and you can see here there's this Gap in the fin here because and these braces too because this is where a template went so right here there was a kind of a weird bulge in the seat post same thing on the other side so I kind of sanded that down a little bit just because it doesn't need to be there we don't have templates look better without that weird bump but if you're ever wondering why there are braces right here and a little slot there that was a template in The Help from my dad on the back side made this go a lot quicker he did a really good job that's actually the first time my dad has ever worked on a car with me so you got to witness that and now uh oh yesterday I painted the underside of the trunk her deck lid because it was just bare metal I still have all that to do in there I don't know if I'll spray that or brush it on or or what I don't I don't know but I'm happy with this how this turned out I just used this uh sem chassis gray I believe it's called here…