Age takes a toll on everything including humans and for the sake of this site fiberglass bodies on Corvettes. My car has never been wrecked, hit or scratched. The body was in perfect condition to the non trained eye. Even though it looked perfect there were stress cracks in hard to notice places. 

Having a good Corvette body specialist is critical to knowing where to discover the stress cracks before painting your Corvette. These cracks can appear along the body seams, in the door jams, hood area and various other places. On my Corvette, the door jams posed the biggest area of concern. It is amazing to see how these cars come off the assembly line back in the day. Some of the problem areas were related to the quality of the assembly line work. 

Other stress cracks areas were simply age related. Fortunately on my car there were not extreme problems that required new body pieces. We did have to strip everything down to the glass and make repairs using resin and slight amount of bondo. The door areas alone took over a week in the body shop. However, most of the time was attributed to getting the seams right. 

We had a few places in the body seams that showed small cracks. A lot of people will replace the areas with one piece replacement units. These eliminate the need to repair seams but take away from originality. If my Corvette had major cracks in the areas I would have probably gone the replacement route as well.

The point of this article is to make you aware of these things in which to look for. If you are planning on restoring a Corvette, have 2 or 3 different body specialist look the car over. I guarantee you each one of them will find a new place to repair. Just keep in mind there are replacement parts that can reduce labor hours verses repairing problem areas. A god body specialist should explain your option and prices.

JF

I finally figured out how to build an image gallery in my corvette blog today. I am now trying to concentrate on getting as many before photos added to the gallery as I can. This group of pictures was taken of my 1977 Corvette the morning we took her to the paint and body shop.

I was able to snag about 15 or twenty photos of the car. You can see that I focused on the problem areas of the car. We had already inspected the car so I knew the trouble areas and more importantly wanted to make sure nothing was overlooked in the paint job. The ealry year Corvettes had piss poor quality paint which on the fiberglass bodies faded quite badly. On light color cars like the Silver Vette, this is even a bigger problem.

You will also notice that the body overall is in great shape. The car is all original and never wrecked. Kinda hard to wreck something you never drive. The paint fade, small stress cracks and the bumpers were not as big of an issue as the seems and door jam areas. Before robotics most cars were made by habd on the assembly line. Corvettes in particular were put together and molded by hand. Alot of cars rolled out of the factory with bad seems. This means that door seams, hood seams etc. were uneven or wavy. You definately will not see crap like this on the cover of Hot Rod Magazine or Trophy winning car show winning classic rides.

The weatherstripping was factory original as well. It really wasn’t in bad shape at all, but it had to be removed in order to paint the car properly. This cost me about $300 to replace and I will provide a review on that product later.

My car also had the original rally wheels and trim rings. I took the rings off and worked a deal with the painter, to strip the original wheels, sandblast them and paint them back with the same color as the car. In my case the car is silver, therefore the color is pretty close and it should be a better quality than store bought spray paint.

The only other thing worth pointing out is the T-Tops. Unfortunately, the sun had faded them down to the fiberglass. I actually considered replacing them with glass T-Tops but at this time, they would be another expense that I dont need.

Take your time to view the remaing pictures in the gallery. I uploaded small pictures and also large photos that wil allow you to get really good detail. Just be patient if you decide to download the big ones.