Jeff's 69 camaro project
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Also be sure to check out the shop helping me out with a lot of body and paint work I can't do at the farm.
Visit them at Eiler's Performance Corner!

The start of it all - Tuesday, October 23, 2001...

I had always been kinda of looking for a 69 camaro with the rally sport grill but I didn't have the money to really look seriously. While living in my apartment in West St. Paul I noticed a camaro with pretty much everything I wanted sitting just four cars down from mine in the garage stalls. After a few months of never seeing it move I decided to leave a note on it to see if whoever owned it was looking to sell it. A few weeks later I got a phone call from a nice woman named Judy. She filled me in on the details about her car and a little of it's history. She had done a little work to it and drove it for a while but then it was not being as reliable as older cars can be so she parked it. She had been thinking about selling it but just had the heart yet. She also had a ton of extra parts for it too that would go along with the car so I was very interested.

We settled on a price and the rest is history as they say!

Below is the progress...

Stage 1 - Get home with the prize.

What I had to start with was a faded alomst barn red 69 camaro, listed as a 68 camaro on the title by the way, and a faded vinyl roof. There was very little rust with a few dings here and there. The lower rear quarter panels had some pretty good dents in them but that was the worst of it. The exhaust had some experimental work done to it that i had never seen before. The biggest problem I was facing was the fact it had not been running in like 7 years from what she told me. If she needed it moved she just had it towed. The engine was a 283 with a quadrajet carb and 350 tranny from a 77 trans-am that leaked pretty bad. A nice addition was the 12 bolt rear-end with 4.11 posi in it. The engine looked clean as a whistle and still had fresh paint on it from the last rebuild. Luckily the only real problem seemed to be that the carb had dried out and was just not working. I put in a rebuild kit and got the car running but when I took it out on the road it would not get above like twenty without a lot of effort. Finally I gave up, bought a conversion plate and stole the holley off the 350 in my 73 nova. With that on I was able to drive it across the state to my parents farm without too much trouble. It did not run the greatest but it did the trick. From there I took the borrowed carb off, got a ride back to the cities and replaced it on to my Nova.

As long as I could get it back to my parents shop the rest should be easy. yeah right...

Stage 2 - New engine and tranny.

With the camaro safely back in my parents shop we decided to hold off on the body work till we had the time to dedicate to it. We still wanted the car to be on the road though in the mean time. Sadly the time of my bright orange 73 Nova was quickly coming to an end. The heart was strong but the body was feeling the years and the miles. After much discussion we removed the engine from the beloved 73 Nova and cleaned it up a little. Then we slapped a 4 speed tranny on it that my dad had not been using and loaded it into the 69 camaro. The exhaust was removed and the best I can explain is that both the pipes came back to a single glass pack. It sat crossways under the car and one pipe went into each side. Then in the middle of the pack two holes had been torched and pipes had been added to go out the back from there. Very confusing but a great conversation piece.
From there we also found that pretty much all the bushings on the front were shot and it was time to replace those. After that it was finally back on the road...

Stage 3 - Remove paint and disassemble

After driving the camaro for about a year it went back into storage at my parents farm for the winter. Towards the end of winter we got the bug to start ripping into the growing project. The floor panels in the car were pretty well rusted through so I bought new ones to be put in later. Also the only real rust on the car is the drivers side rocker panel so my dad bought a new one and I traded him a stereo for it that he could put in his pro-street 69 Nova. Before we could get to that though we bought a tub of paint remover and went to town stripping some of the thickest paint I have ever seen.

Once we got under the skin of this camaro we found, as almost all car projects go, there were a few more problems we were going to have to deal with. Turns out someone had brazed rear quarters on this car and used a lot of bondo to cover up the problem areas so to speak.

We will have to deal with that later but now it's just more paint stripping and disassembly.


Stage 4 - Sand blasting

Spring 2003 - With almost all the paint stripped and sanded from the main body I start the sandblasting. I don't want to sandblast the entire car because on the large flat body panels this can cause warping of he metal. I only blast in the door frames, drip guards, and the car frame. These are the areas that are strong enough to not warp or are hard enough to get at that sandblasting works best. Most of the body is taken apart here as well so we make sure as much of the car, even the stuff never seen, gets sanded and a fresh coat of paint in the end. I have left the doors on because one of the rocker panels needs to be replaced and the doors are needed for gapping.

After a week at Eilers...

July 7th, 2003 - Got home for the long weekend and I picked up the car from Eliers shop. They put in my new floorpans and cut out my bad rockerpanel and quarterpanels. My poor car is looking pretty sad but when the new sheet metal gets here it will be much happier! It's looking like everything from the doors back will have new metal so that will save time in body work because it should all be nice and straight with no need for bondo! My plan this weekend was to finish sandblasting the rest of the car but we could not get the sandblaster going so we spent a lot of time working on that till we got that running nice again. It's looking like it will be 4 weekends before I will be home again so I will not be able to work on it much but hopefully things will still get done on it...

Parts going on!

October 6th 2003 - Well it has been a long time since I updated but there has been a lot going on! When we last left I was ordering up quarter panels. As these projects often do, this one got a little out of control. After talking it over for quite a while I decided not to half-ass this and I ordered up a few more parts. I decided to also get a whole new truck floor, a new tailpan, new inner fender-wells, a new trunk lid and spoiler, and a few other things. Now I started out ordering from Camaro Central because those guys rock! They have a ton of stuff and they know their camaros'. However, they could not get me one of the quarters because they were on backorder. I waited as long as they could but I finally had to go to another place because I had to get things moving.
So here come my rant, I called up Rick's first generation camaro. All I can say is they are total jackasses! I ordered a driver-side quarter-panel, a full trunk pan w/ the 4 brackets that go to the quarters and tailpan, plus a spoiler I had forgotten to order before. So these parts show up in NO boxes and totally destroyed. The quarter panel's sail was bent over and the rest of it looked like it had been drug behind the truck. The spoiler was cracked and the trunk pan just had the lip bent up. None of it had any mailing labels on it and no packaging what-so-ever. Normally you refuse shipment and it goes back but since we had no labels the shop figured they better keep them. When I called into the place they kept telling me that it shipped with boxes and that this was the shipping companies fault. Whatever! They offered to send me out new parts if I was in a hurry but they would charge me for them. Since each quarter cost about 500 bucks I declined that option. They kept trying to tell me they couldn't do anything because it was all the shipping companies fault. I explained that I looked over my cc bill and was unable to find where I paid the shipping company any money. All I could find was the 750 dollars I paid to them so I think it is there problem and I could care less about the shipping company. So after a lot of fighting and yelling on the phone I got my parts in tack only 2 weeks late but whatever. Needless to say I will never use them again and I recommend no one else does either!
So now we had the quarters and all the parts so the fitting began. I guess this car had been rear-ended a few times or something because it did not want to line up at all. Eilers shop got it all lining up and the gapping is nearly perfect now. The dash was a rusty mess so they cut that out and I bought a new one to fit in there. The trunk is in as well and I had to get a new hinge on the drivers side because that was tweaked a little. So next week I need to finish my sandblasting and then we can weld and seal everything up. In the meantime I have been helping out here and there on my friend Damin's custom bike. Go here to check that project out! See you soon with more pics...

Getting Closer to Paint!

January 22nd 2004 - So it is a new year and there has been much progress in the 69 Camaro project. Now that Eilers had the body panels on and the body work done on the rear half we brought it home for a little work. First we took the front sub-frame off to prime and paint it with the radiator support. While this was out we also welded up the frame a little better to make sure everything is solid and cleaned up a little rust that was starting on the new floor pans because of humid summer with it stored at the farm. Then when we put it back on I slapped in some new polyurethane bushings.

\ With the front end all off we took out the heater core and sealed the firewall. Then with that sealed we welded up a few other lines and smoothed everything over.

Once the front sub-frame was taken care of it was time to line up the front end and put on the fenders to check our gapping. Back down at Eilers shop they assembled it and finished up the body work on the front. Somehow along the way here my plans to shave the door handles got vetoed by everyone else but I guess I can live with that. Now the body is basically taken care of. All it should need is a little bit of block sanding and it will be ready for paint. Now to finish up all the last minute things.

I have to take my hat off to Detroit Speed and Engineering! I bought some sub-frame connectors from them and they are just top of the line all the way. My dad bought some sub-frame connectors for his 69 nova from Art Morrison and they basically sent him some pieces of square tubing that he could have bought just about anywhere for a lot cheaper. It didn't even come with directions so he called them and was told that directions would cost 20 dollars more. Real nice! This was certainly not the case with mine! DSE includes perfect instructions and templates as well as solid, well fabricated, strong connectors that fit in perfect and will be almost unnoticed when finished. As far as I am concerned they were worth every penny!

 

 

 

 

Oh My God there is paint on it!

August 26nd 2005 - WOW! Has it really been that long? After taking a little break for a while the camaro project is back in action and looking better than ever. Sometime in July the jamming was wrapped up and the car has been moved back to the farm to be assembled. Once that is done it's back to the shop for final paint on the outside. We have come to the conclusion that with this paint we have to paint the car all assembled. AS you can see the motor is in and the front clip is going on slowly but surely... It sure is a lot harder to put these nicely painted panels on than it was to take apart the old ones!

 

 

I knew it was going to look amazing but this is ridiculous!

September 25th - 28th 2006 - The day has finally come. Well, actually it was quite a few days in a row! I went down to the shop Monday morning where Matt and I spent the entire day masking off the car. I can tell you right now, masking is my least favorite job even on a beautiful car like this. But taking the masking off always makes up for it! Anyway, day two consisted of the primer going on and the two coats of silver metallic. Every time you laid a coat down you had to have the next coat on within about 12 hours so it was nice to know there was no stopping us now!

\ Day three we put down a couple of coats of DBC500 which is like a clear that will help hide any imperfections. After that Damin came in and we started taping flames. We had a few discussions about what would look best. I always planned to have the racing stripes but have them break out into flames but the trunk proved to be more of a challenge with the spoiler. Damin came up with a great idea for a reverse flame for that location. He also thought it would be nicer if the flame in the front stayed contained in the pin stripping edge around the racing stripe. The thought behind that being the rounded shape really holds true to the racing strip idea. In the end I decided I really wanted the flames breaking out though so we came up with another idea at the last minute to round off the front instead. The traditional stripe would just go over the edge but this looks much cooler if you ask me... After that we sprayed the copper metallic where the flames would go and waited. An hour or so after that we pulled up the tape and saw the goods!

By this time it was about 2 in the morning on day four. All the masking for the flames had been removed and we got the first coat of orange glow on. This bought us a little more time so I went back to the cities to work and the guys went to finally get some sleep. The next day I was stuck at work but Ardy and Matt put the next 3 coats of orange glow on and then a whole lot of clear. That Sunday I snuck back for a few hours with Elise and we got to take off all the masking. Then we rolled it outside and took a few pictures of it. Now I just have to put it all back together...

 

 

 


Well no project like this is ever finished but I can drive it again and that makes me pretty darn happy. Check it out!