1950 Chevy Coupe

This is what the car looked like when it was unloaded off the trailer.

The car was dismantled and prepped for media blasting. This is Jack taking the passenger side door apart.

Here's the car after soda blasting. The soda is a non-abrasive media used mainly for paint removal. Although it does remove light rust...

Justin had to use an abrasive media to remove the heavier rust.

Both front floor pans needed replaced. This is the pan on the passenger side.

The rocker panels needed replaced as well. This is Jack repairing the passenger side rocker.

This picture shows the completed installation on the passenger side.

The lower rear quarters needed to be replaced on both sides due to rust (collision damage on passenger side only). Again, we're showing the passenger side here.

Jack cut out the area that the aftermarket panel will cover...

cleaned and treated the inner panel, and welded in the new outer piece.

We removed the front cross member...

media blasted it along with other front end parts...

painted and rebuilt the front end.

The lower area of the rear quarter panel was cut out and prepped...

so a new aftermarket piece could be installed. This was done of both sides of the body.

The rear tail pan was removed...

and a new piece was installed.

This shot shows the passenger side of the body with the new lower quarters installed as well as the new rear tail pan.

Once the damaged areas of the body were repaired, Fred removed the body from the frame...

the frame was then media blasted...

primed and painted.

We then put the body on a rotisserie and Fred media blasted it inside and out.

After media blasting, Evette shot a rust encapsulator on the inside of the roof, up under the dash and other areas that were not blasted completely...

then she shot primer on the entire body.

The rear end was rebuilt, cleaned and painted before...

being installed under the frame along with the front suspension.

The body was then placed back on the frame assembly.

This is the inside of the driver side door when the car first arrived at our shop. We already knew at this point that the inside and outside door bottoms on both the left and right side doors needed to be repaired.

After media blasting the doors, we could see just how much we needed to remove. The new aftermarket patch panels were trimmed down to fit the areas that were cut out, and then screwed into place...

so that when we cut the outer door bottoms off we'd have the bottom edges to mate to when we repaired them. We applied a rust encapsulator inside the door bottoms to help with future issues.

Once the doors were fitted to make sure the panels were in the correct location, all pieces were fully welded and ground.

The doors were then taken off of the car and final media blasted before being wiped down for primer.

The trunk lid had minor rust repair done to it before final media blasting as well. We then shot primer on all three pieces before installing on the car.

The engine for this car was delivered to us in a crate. It's a 278 cubic inch inline 6-cylinder from Wayne Manufacturing.

Fred is prepping the engine for the Tremac 5-speed transmission.

Here's Fred and Jack carefully installing the engine/transmission.

Once the engine/transmission was installed, we noticed a couple of areas where there was a clearance issue...

the first being with the rear carburetor and the firewall.

We notched out the firewall...

welded in the new piece...

ground the welds and shot primer on it.

The other area that had a clearance issue was with the transmission and transmission tunnel. The factory cover wasn't domed enough to clear the aftermarket Tremac 5-speed...

so we simply cut the center out of the original cover, made a new raised center, welded it in, ground the welds, applied seam sealer (like from the factory) and shot primer on it.

The customer wanted us to french the headlights using these aftermarket buckets.

Here's Jack final grinding the welds...

on the left side front fender.

Although the hood for this car was straight, it had quite a bit of surface rust that had to be removed.

First we media blasted it with a non-abrasive media to remove the paint without warping it...

then we used rags soaked in an acid-based rust remover to remove the majority of the rust...

as well as using a mild abrasive wheel.

The hood cleaned up pretty good. This is how clean metal must be on both sides before punching louvers in it.

Here's the hood after being stripped, louvered and primed.