Expert Do's and Don'ts of Modified Bumper Plating

Today on muscle car. How to tear apart a convertible top frame, the do s and don't of bumper prep and a Cougar that's ready for the kill.

Hey guys, welcome to Muscle car. You know, when you start on a new project, there's a lot of different directions you can go, but it all boils down to two basic build styles, stock and modified. Now, stock may be great for that cruise down memory lane on a Saturday night but modified adds a whole new flex to that classic muscle and that's the direction we decided to take with their 69 year one tribute trans Am

leaving a stranded on the side of the road was the first of many surprises the 69 Firebird 400 had for us. Surprise number two floor pans pieced together with brazen rot and old car stereo parts. But the gnarliest surprise of all was what was under the paint.

Even the Vatican doesn't have anything this holy after year one replaced most of the sheet metal we dropped in the LS seven,

assembled the rear end lit a fire under the custom roll bar and slathered the body in plastic

we got it all primed and blocked out. Now it's time to knock the tin off of this thing. And once we get all the body panels out of the way we can smooth out the door jam, get the seam sealer in it and get it in final prime

there.

After drilling some alignment holes, it's time to take all that hard work back apart. The last thing before final prime is sealing up all the open seams.

I'm using three M's fast and firm seam sealer.

A trick to get a smooth seam is to dip your finger in some lacquer thinner. It'll let your finger glide right over the sealer.

Seam Sealer is designed to fill in the gaps between sheet metal to prevent moisture and dirt from accumulating and causing rust

and it'll keep your trunk from filling up with water.

If the first prime doesn't block out, you can always lay down some more rusty fender and relo

it. But the Trans Am is looking good. So we're on to final prime.

But first masking, hey, what else can we say? Just cover up whatever you don't want primed.

I loaded my gun with PGSK 38 primer reduced 10% with the DT reducer. So it lays out smooth.

I'm only putting down two coats because the rusty fender we used for first prime blocked out pretty straight

the roller bar. It's only going to get one coat because it's going to be upholstered and all I'm really doing is sealing it up.

We let the primer dry a few hours and roll it out to make room for the body panels. A couple more coats. A K 38 and all the parts are up to speed.

It's something we've been putting off for a while and now is a good time to take care of it. Prepping the convertible top frame. It needs to be blasted and painted before we put the convertible top on it. So we need to get everything off that isn't metal, send it off to the blaster.

These things look like they've got 10,000 parts, but once you get into them, they're really not that complicated.

But if you've never dealt with one before, 10 bucks invested in a manual would be well spent.

If you can save the tax strips, do it,

they need to be solid enough to hold a staple, but ours have been poked a few too many times. So we had to order new ones to the tune of about 500 bucks a set.

We're done now that the front sides of the panels are primed and dried. I can tackle the backsides. Some sealers claim that you can spray directly over the e coat without sandy, but I'd rather knock the shine off first.

Now, scotch prices are great for prepping out the backsides of hoods and that type of thing. But the one thing you really got to be careful of is these things will break apart

and leave little particles down in between the skin.

So be sure to blow that out really good before you paint. Otherwise it'll come out and land in your fresh finish

or you can also wet sand

with say some 400 grit.

The problem there is that the water gets down inside

and then as you spray,

as soon as you go over it like that, it pressurizes in between there and water will bubble out from between the skin

that'll drive you nuts too

and done.

I'll tell you, I thought I'd never see the day that the firebird actually gets color on it. But we got our jams all prepped out. Once I get some sealer down, start laying down some white,

some white DP sealer will even out the scratches left by the Scotch brights. Think of it as an insurance policy. You might be all right without it, but it leaves the chance of something bleeding up through the paint.

I only need one quick coat. You won't have to put down as much base coat later if you use a sealer, close to the same color

while I've been busy in the booth. Brent's been in the mixing room working on the Arctic white we're using as a color coat.

It's a GM factory color. So the mixing system has the formula on file and tells you which toners you use and how much

you might think white would be pretty simple, but there's lots of different shades of white.

This one mixes five different toners including yellow, red and even black.

What you got there, Mr Buttrey. You got your little Arctic white right on. Thanks for mixing that up for me. No problem. Well, hey, coming up after the break, we're gonna finish jamming all our sheet metal. So stick around

after the break. Take a behind the scenes, look at a world class plating shop and pick up some tips from an expert.

Hey, guys, we're back. Got the mask car loaded up my gun. We're ready to rock

because we used a white sealer. I only had to lay down two coats of base to jam. The entire car took less than a quarter

after about 45 minutes, a coat of clear will lock in the color and give it some shine.

Well, the parts have to dry for a while. So now is a good chance to bring our newly smoothed Impala bumpers over to advanced plating. See how we did prepping them out for chrome.

What's it going, Steve?

Hey, Rick. Hey, good to meet you

guy. What do you guys got going on here? These are the uh bumpers for red sled. How'd you start off with these?

A lot of grinding

and then uh

basically just tig welded them all together. Ground it kind of smooth.

Well, your fabrication looks really good here. I like the way you did your bracing back there. That's good and solid. This one here doesn't look too bad at all. You've

added a few pounds. Uh,

yeah, a little weight to it. What have you pulled them in? I took 3/8 of an inch off both sides. How close are you to your fender right here?

Yeah, it's pretty close. It takes two people to wiggle it on there.

That's one thing you always wanna do is let us know how much room we have here and then we'll keep it to scale so that, uh, it'll fit back on your car. Nice job on this.

I think the only thing we could have maybe done to help the project alone would have been to strip them first to begin with. We kind of prefer to grind these ourselves. Uh, you're more experienced metal

than some customers that come in here. So they aren't dipped out too far. Uh, this is a very popular look. Half the bumpers coming in here are either bolt smooth or one piece. So we have a lot of dos

or don't and about half of everything coming in right now is on the, not what to do side. So we'd like to let the people kind of know what not to do. So, mind if we sneak back there and take a look at it, we'll go on over there and see what we have going. Cool.

Advanced is known as one of the finest plating shops in the country with skilled workers giving hands on attention to every piece. As we were checking out the action in the plating shop, we saw something kind of familiar.

I thought I saw our comment bumpers floating around here. How are those things coming?

They're coming along pretty well. We have one

is a multi step process that starts with cleaning, then activating the metal in an alkaline bath.

Next is the first of many rinses, then an acid edge

and another rinse.

The cyanide copper strike is the most dramatic. Oh, wow,

dude, that is cool.

After a rinse and another dip in acid edge, it's into the nickel bath where it'll hang out for about 90 minutes

while the back bumper was hanging out in the nickel, we caught up with the front bumper further along in the process. It's already been chromed and is now being cleaned in sodium bi sulfate and a final series of rinses.

The final result.

Wow, this thing is going to look great flying down the track.

But back to the reason we're here in the first place bumper prep do s and don't

you got some examples of what not to do for us? I sure do. Rick. Uh What I have here is about three different ways you can go about smoothing these bumper bolts in on these old cars. One way to do it is to actually take a bumper bolt, put a washer around it, weld it

and actually remove the head of the bolt.

Ok. That's a good solid piece. You can then take that and weld that to the back of your bumper.

I really recommend that

when you weld these on there that you actually test, fit them to your bumper braces. So you know, they still fit, got your tolerances to your body.

Another way to do it is actually to take a bumper bolt square off the head

and then come and

make that into your bumper here. Leave

a little bit of weld build up to allow us to grind it down.

One of the things not to do guys have a tendency to wanna just grind only where this weld is

that's going to have to be filled in with lead.

Here we have another set of 55 Chevy bumpers in process. Same situation, three piece

welding bumpers come in that have been over ground. A lot of extra time and effort goes into filling the dips. This can add hundreds to the cost of chrome in a bumper. So take Steve's advice and lay off the grinder.

Another don't

using stainless steel to make your repairs, they can work with it, but it requires special treatment and they've got to know beforehand. You've used it. Hey, thank you very much for your hospitality and show us the dos

and most importantly, the don't of what to do to your bumpers. I know red sleds parts are in the best of hands. You got it, Rick.

I appreciate it. You're certainly

welcome.

You bet

we're out of here.

These things look good.

Yeah, it does. Too bad. It's gonna get scraped up when we drag it down the track.

That'd be all had a little character.

There you go. Hey, stick around. Because later on in the show we're gonna be introducing you to our next project and it's looking for a fight

up next. It may be on the endangered species list, but this cat's still on the prowl

today on flashback. A 1970 Cougar Eliminator.

OK. Audience. Here's a car that's going to tear into the competition

equipped with the ultra rare Boss 302. This Cougar's claws are sharpened and ready for the kill

time for the elimination round.

This fully restored numbers matching beauty looks just like it did when it rolled off the showroom floor in 1970.

Getting behind the wheel of one of these is, well, the cat's meow.

It's like no other when you're in it. I mean, it's just you get the, the attention, you get everything, you got the horse power, you've got the handling, you got just about anything you want.

Back in the early six Mercury wanted its own puny car to ride the success of Ford's Mustang.

So using that as their model, they came up with their own luxury muscle car

in 1967 the Cougar was unleashed

people loved the unique grill design with hidden headlights

and those trick sequential taillights.

Midway through 69 the Eliminator package was added named after

dyno

Don Nicholson's funny car dragsters.

Mercury took the standard Cougar and blacked out the grill and tail panel. Then they added a hood scoop spoilers on the front and rear and so many stripes. This thing looks more like a tiger than a Cougar.

You also got a special competition handling package with a beefed up suspension, true dual exhaust, wider seven inch tires and a full set of gauges with a clock

and only Eliminators got a Cougar on the fuel door instead of the Lincoln Mercury Crest

three engines were offered this year. The standard 351

the Cobra Jet 428 or the exclusive Boss 302 that's growing under this store.

If you wanted one in your Cougar, you had to get the eliminator. This legendary small block debuted at April Fool's Day in 1969 and officially it was rated at 290 horsepower, but they weren't fooling anyone. The actual number was closer to 350.

It was basically ad tuned race engine taken from the Trans Am Mustangs under the air cleaner was a huge Haley four Brell carburetor capable of sucking in 780 cubes of air per minute.

Race features included solid lifters and a high rise aluminum intake manifold with a four inch bore and three inch stroke capable of making 10.5 to 1 compression. This cat could pounce from 0 to 60 in 7.6 seconds.

All Boss 302 s came with a four speed transmission and a traction lock rear end which included a 31 spine axle and nodular casing

and only the Boss came with an 8000 RPM.

Out of 2267 Eliminators produced in 1970 only 323 had the Boss Engine making this one rare car. Now, this would be the last year for this package and pretty much for the Cougar as a muscle car over the next few years, it ballooned into a declawed fat cat. Thanks to stricter emission standards and changing consumer tastes

with bold graphics, wild style and some Boss muscle into the hood. The Eliminator really put the

G

and Cougar

style.

What do you think we ought to do about this big hole, man after the break, check out the plans for this highly desirable muscle car slated to become the UFC street fighter.

Hey guys, we're back now. You might think we're crazy for dragging another project into the shop and we already have three going. But the Trans Am is gonna be heading home to year one soon enough. And red sled. Well, what's gonna be hitting the streets here pretty quick besides, it's never too early to start planning your next project.

UFC President Dana White is looking for a car that's tough enough to hang with his crowd when he visited the power block recently, he agreed that a 71 Kuda with a 440 is the perfect match.

This car will be bad to the bone.

It should live up to its name

Street Fighter.

After an extensive search, we finally found what we were looking for. 71 Barracuda. We really didn't care about the fact that the engine compartments been gutted Brent here. He ran down to Georgia to pick this thing up. So, what did you think when you checked it out for the first time?

Other than being brown,

it seems

it was a pretty good car. No rust, you know, it was pretty straight other than a few dings here and there, the glass was good,

pretty solid.

Came with a bunch of parts too, didn't it? Oh, man, he had everything for it. Sweet. I think you can tell the guy went through and redid everything on it.

Oh, I

asked him to do that too bad. We're not gonna be using it.

Yeah, I heard that

brand new dash pad in it. It's pretty nice.

You know, we should probably change at this rear balance to a Ka

one.

Yeah, it's almost a shame. This one here is in such a nice shape. Yeah, the

Kas had the openings. We got a sweet magnify exhaust that's gonna go on this thing.

This thing showed up with a grill too. Those aren't easy to find. No. And you know, that's probably the best looking grill they ever had on these old

Kudus. Oh, yeah, absolutely, man.

So what do you think we gonna do about this big hole, man? Oh, we got plans for that. Wanna check it out. Let's do it

to the muscle car cage.

Hey, Brent. Like what you see? Yeah, man. That thing is cool. Yeah. Horsepower built it. It's a 440 with a six pack intake, but 425 horse down. It's not bad at all. Not bad at all. Huh? Should get us down the road. Well, this thing's got to go back in the cage for now because we got a lot more work to do before we can tackle that project. But stay tuned in the street fighter. Gonna be out looking for a fight here real soon

for now. We're out of here.

Probably cover that up first. Huh?