The first chore was to find a body shop that I could work with. I knew I wanted to pick a place that would be comfortable with working at my slow paying pace. I also wanted a place somewhat local, as I wanted to check in on it from time to time. So I grabbed our yellow pages and hit the street. I visited a few and checked out their work. I discussed my terms of the project by not having to be the highest priority. In the end I settled on Pro Street Creations here in Farmington Hills. So far I am very pleased with the quality of work and the flexibility he has when it comes to payment. He is only doing as much work as I can pay him, and for me that works out great. Now Pat (the owner of Pro Street) did not take on my project at first. Pat mostly did Mopar cars and a few Chevelles. I saw the work that he had done and I really wanted him to do my car. With a little persuasion, he took on my project. So within a few weeks, I had the car stripped down pretty good and drove it to Pat's shop. (sitting on a milk crate) Here is a picture of what it looked like after I stripped many of the parts off of it. After all I only wanted Pat to do the body work. I was to do the rest. I also took many pictures of all the areas I thought would be tricky to either find parts for or put back together.
After Pat got a hold of the car, he and his team began to strip the car down. The plan was to take the car down to the bare metal and determine what we needed to buy. At this point I've already been scrounging the NOS sites, eBay and Craigslist looking for other parts I knew I needed. So I had an idea of what was out there. Again there are very little parts in the aftermarket, so it's been a long road looking for parts.
Here are some shots after it was stripped, and the front clip engine/trans already pulled. It was about now I started to wonder just what I had gotten myself into.
So as you can see it was pretty rough. I knew the quarter panels were not right as someone before me had removed the corner lights that were supposed to be back there. I just didn't know how bad it was. So now I know what I needed to buy at first. I needed both fenders, both quarters, both front floor pans and a trunk floor. That was just for starters. It was at this point I started to look for donor cars. Every one I found around here was rusted in the same areas as mine was, or not much better. I ended up finding a place in California call
GM Sports. They had a huge inventory of 70's era muscle car parts. I called them up, and after a few days of checking they found everything I needed but the passenger side rear quarter. Every passenger quarter the team at
GM Sports found was previously repaired piece they didn't want to sell or a POS. Eventually I gave up on waiting for them to find a suitable quarter. We wanted to get moving on the project, so I had them air ship the other parts to me. It turns out shipping it by plane was actually cheaper. I just had to go to the airport to pick them up. In about 1 week later I did just that and picked up my parts. They all came in great shape just like they said. The parts were far better than the ones I had. And of course still way better than a repair panel. So Pat had a good start on parts and I started to think about the possibility of buying other cars for the parts I knew I would soon need.
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