Back to the Red Mist project. The car is identical to the one in the movie Kick Ass and is on its way back to Woody Frees and his sons. Paying attention to detail and quality is what it’s all about. Never be in too much a hurry to do a project. Just make sure you get it done right.
This month I’ve got a really cool project that’s gonna take us out of the big garage and put us in the small garage. I know you guys have heard of the Pinewood Derby races, usually involving the Boy Scouts. Now we have something called SEMA Pinewood Races Builder Race.
I got a really interesting request for a cool project from a guy out in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Woody Frees.
This month we’re going to cover a little different category than repair steps and procedures or building hot rods or repairing vehicles We’re going to talk about getting creative and using your mind to build with car parts. I wrote a column in Autobody News (Sept. 09) about building a trophy for a Long Beach car show which was a big charity event last year. Ed Sunkin, an editor from Tomorrow’s Technician (a Babcox company), contacted me saying “I read that article on that trophy you built. We’ve got this school of the year award coming up and we wanted to know if you want to build a trophy?”
We are going to switch it up this month and go back to the old school way of fixing things on a `57 Thunderbird. A friend from New York shipped me out his Thunderbird, and there’s a good story behind it. His Dad had it in the family for awhile and took it for its last drive before turning it over to his son. We know what happened from there. It got in a car accident and took a heavy hit to the front. My buddy knows my work and was prepared to ship me the car from New York, so I told him ‘no problem, I could fix it.’
I had what I thought was a small project, but it turned out to be harder than expected. Tom Foster is a buddy and a serious bike builder who’s been around for a couple of decades. He’s got a bike called an EVO HD Bushido that he’s building, and he came to me do the body and paint work.
A couple of months ago I was approached by my buddies, Kevin and Victor, about making a unique trophy for this year’s charity Long Beach Car show. We wanted it to be unique and authentic and it occurred to me to use scraps and miscellaneous parts from around the shop.
At Huntington Beach Bodyworks, we recently began a new project: restoring a ’57 Chevy Bel-Air. In this article we will focus on the main ‘showpiece’ of this car, a custom airbrushed headliner. For this project I brought in airbrush artist Matt Van Wingerden after seeing some of his amazing mural and portrait work.
I’ve got a couple of Harley tanks that a customer wants to repaint. He’s had this paint job for 10 years and it’s got a couple cracks where the tank is leaking and the paint is starting to bubble up. He wants it done in the identical color using flames.
This 2008 GT Mustang is going to be the first numbered car in a series. It’s also the first car I’ve done using a waterborne refinish, thanks to PPG’s Envirobase.®
Rich Evans uses only Chicago Pneumatic orbital sanders, which he believes are the best orbital sanders on the market, to create award winning designs at Huntington Beach Bodyworks.
This month I will be discussing my father’s 1958 Chevy Pickup. The truck has a lot of history and sentimental value to my father. It was originally purchased in 1958 by my grandfather who was a farmer in Brighton, South Dakota. My father grew up and learned to drive in this truck and about 10 years ago, he was given the truck by my grandfather. It was still running and in decent shape, but after 50 years of service, it was in need of a fresh facelift.
Recently I was putting a completed project together – reinstalling the hood, deck lid, and doors. You don’t have to be in this business to know that no matter how meticulous you try to be, things usually don’t go back together as easily as it was to take them apart – especially with cars and even more so with a custom car. When you get a new project for custom paint and body work, you first mock up the car, break it down, do the custom body work and paint, clear it, buff it, and put the whole thing back together again.
This month, I thought that I would tell you about a recent project involving a new metallic silver Hemi Charger. This project wasn’t as complicated as some of our others and there were no custom fabrications, however, it was a very nicely upgraded vehicle that turned out beautifully.