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I decided to fix some body issues that have been bothering me. Some of these things have been an issue with me since it was painted in 1983. You know how this goes, I was putting in a body shop for this. Well, as long as it’s there I might as well do….
My list wasn’t that long or so I thought. I have known Dave at the shop for many years. I had the misfortune of having mice nest in the back over a winter some years back. That is when I met Dave. We figured out how to get the urine smell out of my car. I also found the hole in my garage where the mice got in and plugged that. He told me the best way to get rid of the smell was to take my car to a field and set it on fire. Not funny and definitely not an option.
Mostly, I am just going to share some pictures I took of the process. Some of them are kind of cool and interesting.
One of the things that I had Dave fix is some damage I had on the back, right end. Dave convinced me to have him, since he was working on that end anyway, fix the leaded seams on the fastback side panels. Both those seams were bubbling up. I stopped by to check on my car one day and Dave had pretty much prepped the entire rear end of the car including the top for paint. He said he was working on much of the rear end any way. In fact he painted 2/3 of the car. When I picked it up and realized that, I did ask why didn’t you go ahead and do the other 1/3?
(The above image is a slide show. Somehow a couple of the images got in there 2X each.)
Dave tried to talk me into NOT replacing the white side stripes. He had to remove the stripe on this side, passenger, do fix the scoop area. I got a replacement side stripe that turned out to be a small bit narrower than the stripes on the car. Plus the stripe on the other side was actually applied incorrectly by the Yoder Body Shop back in 1983. Dale put it on so that the front end was higher than the rear end. I finally decided it was time to fix that. If it had been unlevel on the passenger side it probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much but seeing it every time I looked at the driver side became too much.
Here is a picture I took without the stripes. This is a slide show so you can flip though the slides to view with and without the stripes. Not that I actually considered leaving the stripe off. Just wouldn’t look the same or like a real Shelby. My car was very dusty when I took this picture. I pulled it out of the shop for some quick pictures.