Seeing your street machine for the first time after it’s been painted and cut and buffed is exhilarating. It’s especially dramatic for those of us who had never seen our cars painted one color before. So you’d think that having a freshly painted body in the garage would be motivation enough to finish the job, but that’s frequently not the case. Maybe it’s the daunting task of sorting through the trim, glass, and interior that you have to reinstall. It could be that you’re heading into the garage with intentions of reassembly, but before you know it, you blow the afternoon just checking out the glassy smooth body lines from every possible angle. Or, it’s possible that you’re petrified to bring any metal trim, fasteners, or tools near the car, visualizing, for example, a huge chip from a botched driprail installation. Whatever the reason, many freshly painted cars won’t see the road for years.
What to do? We like to ask the experts—the guys who do this stuff every day. We knew we were in good company with Dave Cross and Kevin Fielder at Hot Rod Haus (HRH) when we dropped off our ’70 Chevelle SS396 (not to be confused with our Cheap Street Chevelle) at their southern Wisconsin shop, which was already laden with musclecars and street rods in various states of restoration. Add in the fact that HRH owner Cross is a diehard Chevelle guy with 20-plus years of show-car restoration experience and we were sold. And, three months later, seeing our Chevelle wrapped in the straightest, shiniest, deepest Torch Red paint we’ve ever seen was enough incentive to return to the HRH for a lesson on post-paint reassembly. Hence, much of this advice applies directly to ’68-’72 GM musclecars, but everyone with a car in need of reassembly can benefit from these techniques. Applying what we learned from Cross, and taking our sweet time, we managed to put the SS back together without a single chip. Trust us—if we can pull this off without screwing up, anyone can resuscitate his ride from the dreaded post-paint coma.
Check out what we learned in the sidebars below.
