My '75 Can of Worms

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Hi all,

I must have read every project blog on this entire site, and was so bummed when I finally reached the end... No more before-and-after pictures to satisfy my desire for instant gratification!!

Alas, now I'm doing my own rehab on a '75 '02 I picked up last summer for a cool grand. Not the best deal in the world, but it's a decent little car so I'm going to fix 'er up to a nice semi-modded daily driver... She wont be a garage queen, but I'd like to turn some heads..

The original color was Polaris, and although I love Polaris, I've always found it a bit sedate for the 2002's whimsical lines... The (awful) respray on the car when I bought it was somewhere in the family of a Mintgrun with awesome (NOT!) racing flames on the front fenders..

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention MY plans for the car... Although the respray was God-awful, the green got me thinking.. Right about that time I was reading the project blog for Scott's NC Taiga Touring and fell in love.

So the car is going Taiga. I'm putting back on the deleted trim, converting to a Euro-rear bumper Squarie, and a Kamei repro front spoiler with the kneeline trim continuing around on it like Senna 27's Agave 02...

Here's the Craigslist picture that the P.O. posted:

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So, the green is too chalky, not a stock color, has those HORRIBLE racing stripes, and probably most of all, is just a crappy paint job.. It's coming off in flakes...

Many of the repairs to the car have been done with HUGE amounts of body filler... So, I promptly signed up for the Autobody and Painting classes at the local junior college...

Time to rip down an '02 and build her back up to glory!!

Here's some pics of the first thing we attacked... The floorboards.. Oh, before the pics - the shock towers and rockers are all solid (California car) but the spare tire well and rear floorboards were rusty....

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Ok... Still getting the hang of this posting thing... Kind of weird that it posts the picture attachments from bottom to top, so if you want the project to be shown in the correct order, you have to attach the LAST photo first...

Well, here goes... On with the project. Step one - deal with all the rust and crapola on the inside floor panels... Enough with all this talking! You want pics!! (don't you?)

Here we go - project floorpan:

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Continuing with "Project Floorplan"... Once we had it cleaned and the crossmember out, the next step was to prep it with this stuff called "Picklix" which is a rust converter. I'm new to all this stuff, so I'm following the lead of my three teachers (who can't seem to all agree on a single thing, by the way) and a fellow 02'er named Justin... He's become my "partner in grime"...

I'm getting some free labor out of him, and he's getting a chance to do a dry run on my car because he's doing a REAL resto... Total ground up, M20 conversion.. Probably gonna have mid five figures in the car by the time it's done... Which should be when his grandsons are getting their licenses. Did I mention the guy's in his 20's now?? (Just teasin' Justin)

Anyway, we hit the floorpans with the converter, and they were ready for the good stuff... Justin had some "Zero Rust" which is akin to POR-15 but without the high price tag.. Plus, he had a bunch... So that's what we used.

I guess if in 5 years my car starts to crumble, I'll know their name "Zero Rust" is a misnomer. ;-)

Ok.. Project Floorplan continues.....

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Ok... Where are we?

Well, with Project Floorplan at a little bit of a stopping point because no one seems to want to pull the trigger on cutting the floor out and putting in new sheet metal..... We've moved on to the exterior... But there are some obstacles....

I'm in the weird position of not being able to leave this car really at the shop where we're working on it. The school's autobody classes are being taught at a temporary facility while they build the new kickass shop (with paint booths and space galore - 5 million dollar new facility)

But what that means for NOW is that we can't leave cars. Oh, and did I mention it's been raining?? So, after each class, I drive the car to the street just outside the college parking lot and park it until the next class... It keeps us from really tackling any big jobs or ripping the car too far apart...

So here's the order we've gone in so far... Put a replacement door on for the passenger side, and a replacement fender for the driver side.. The passenger door had crapola regulator problems and a non-working, always-open vent window... So it was a nightmare with keeping the car watertight. The drivers fender was a nightmare of kinked metal, so it had to go. Got both replacements from one guy on Craigslist for a hundred bucks. Remains to be seen if I got a good deal.

Anyhoo, Got those parts on the car, then went about the process that I think will take me through the entire job.... Take a part off, strip it, get epoxy primer on it to seal the metal, then move on to the next panel. When the entire car is in epoxy primer and totally sealed, I'll get the doors totally aligned (to make sure they CAN be - as they are both pretty munched).

Then once the door gaps are good, the bodywork will start. DA a spot down to metal, use pins, dolly/hammer, and whatnot to get it as straight as possible, then body filler.

By then, the summer will be upon us, so I'll just cover the body filler with primer surfacer... The car will probably look like a polka-dot monster for a while...

Okay - enough talk for a while. How about some pics of the first panel??

The hood. Easy to take off and work with, without rendering the car too helpless.

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Sanded all that rust off and got to do my first spraying in a paint booth!!

I think I did an okay job - no runs or sags... Of course, primer is especially forgiving... Well, I'll have plenty of practice with primers of all different sorts before this car is ready for color and clear...

With any luck, that'll be before my kids are getting their learner's permits.... And I don't even HAVE any kids...

Dumb joke. Better to just give you pictures, yah?

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With the hood in epoxy, it was time to move on to the doors... I'm generally moving from front to back, but skipped the front fenders because we had some good weather and the fenders can be easily moved inside if the rain starts up again...

When I bought the car, the driver's door was already a replacement, and now the passenger door is from another car as well (because I'm more afraid of trying to fix broken door/window innards than I am of body work).

Both doors are literally DEPOTS OF BONDO. It took two full days (and countless applications) of nasty-ass paint stripper to get down to the body filler... and because stripper only softens body filler and doesn't really take it fully off, I finally broke down and hit it with the Dual Action sander...

I forgot my camera on the night that I finally got the doors down to metal, but here you can see some of the before and during pics....

[Grover]

Hey, I remember that car!!! I used to live in Fairfax and would see it driving around occasionally. Good luck with the resto, looks like you're off to a good start.

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Howdy Grover!

This car used to be in Fairfax??!!

That is extremely awesome. Because I live (and the car now lives) in FAIRFAX!!! It has returned home...

I bought the car off a guy in Sebastapol, but it's nice to hear it's a Marin car... When I took it to Bill Arnold's shop, his trusty assistant Nate said he'd seen it too, but I didn't know it was a western Marin car. Again, awesome.

Anyway, thanks for the vote of confidence. I suppose we're off to a decent start, but isn't finishing the hard part?? Kind of like those shows on TV where the people start demoing a house with sledgehammers... It's all fun and games until you have to start measuring...

I'll try to keep the photos coming.

Cheers,

Adam

PS - here's a couple of photos to show my inspirations for the color, spoiler, and driving lights....

[Tommy]

Nice project and good progress. The car looks quite solid. Those couple holes are easy to weld if there's not more rust where the subframe mounts. Our cars may end up looking like twins as I'm also planning taiga for my -76. I will use front bumper so there's at least some difference :-)

Tommy

[indisguise]

Loving this build.

Looks like you are diving in head first and thats what I like to see. To be honest your car looks fairly solid (READ mid-westerners dream) however the 75's seem to hide a few surprises....

Good luck and keep us posted.

[Caesar]

ADAM !

still refusing to go POLARIS or BLACK ?

happy to see you starting your resto project ! keep it up !

-JohnV

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Lol... Yeah John, no-go on the sedate (but wonderful) original Polaris... And no offense to all the lovely Schwartz '02s out there, but for some reason Black never looked right on Beemers to me until the mid eighties.. E28's and E30's look AWESOME in black, but IMO, not our beloved 2002..

So, Taiga it is! (Don't hate me John V ;-))

Tommy - was just checkin out your Goodfellas blog again... Man, I am continually BLOWN AWAY at the level of knowledge on this board. Hopefully my humble rehab will create a nice daily driver that I can be proud of... Any pics of the '76 that's goin' Taiga?? What color was it originally?

Cheers all... Thanks for checking out the progress... I'll keep the pictures comin'...

Adam

[Caesar]

dont worry , already hate ya !

just show up more in the chatroom , you know the way !

gotta go now tough xD

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Ok... Project "Door-strip" has come to a grinding halt due to rain... As you can see, even our "treated" metal totally RUSTED!! I won't have a long enough block of time until the weekend to sand down all the little bits and get these doors cleaned up enough to get a good coat of epoxy primer on them..

So for the rest of the week, I'll take the opportunity to complete "Project Floorpan"...

But first - a few pics of the doors as they are.. Just to keep the record straight... Wait - did someone say straight?? There isn't a straight panel on this entire car!!

Especially the doors.