Good morning all, Ok so I just picked up a 72 Grabber yesterday... I went to actually get a parts car for my original 72 Maverick and somehow ended up with another project, the car was just too solid to not take home... Anyway one of the only bad spots on the car is the driver side rear quarter where the fender flares. It looks like there is a chunk of bondo missing that was forming the flare. That wouldn't be anything unusual except for I believe this car has it's original paint. So I was a bit confused, does anyone know if the Grabbers had factory bondo on the quarters where the flares are formed???
It is very common to find little areas of factory body filler all over the car. Almost every hood I ever sanded down has filler in the rear corners and I have found it many times on the body too.
I think to better answer your question, NO, it's not meant to have bondo there from the factory. However, as the other guys have mentioned, it's not uncommon for a car to go through the assy line and have to get pulled off for a minor repair, or maybe get repaired before being put on the line is more likely. Anyway, it's very likely it was done AT the factory but doesn't mean it IS factory!
Understood! Thanks very much for the insight! I figured it was something like that, or maybe even done after the car was purchased new and taken back to the dealer to fix. Who knows...
From the guys I've talked to that worked at St.Thomas, they were pretty rough with the cars, most of the time, it was a quick fix, and the car was shipped to a wholesaler, never to a dealer.
You are not going to know what is really all under there until you get the old paint off and you can then see what you are dealing with. Once you have a good idea how much solid metal is there, you can make the right choices for treatment of the metal and repair - or worst case, cutting it out and replacing the quarter skin. BTW - that is not a spot that I have seen factory filler .........
I've got to say that is not from the factory. Somebody has repaired that one before. May have been a dealer, don't know...but I'm sure it wasn't done from the factory. Looks very repairable though.
Yeah....that Bondo is really thick. I would wonder where else in the car is the bondo that thick. Look it over real well.
Thats not original...That quarter would have gone to salvage repair and scrapped.If it happened on the shell during assembly...They would have pulled the dent in salvage and repaired it...They wouldnt have left that big a crease in it.
I'm going to do a little more investigating and see what I can figure out happened here. Thanks for the input.