Comments From The Forgotten Fiberglass Community
Here’s a place you can share your comments and add to our body of knowledge on restoring and building a vintage fiberglass sports car.
You’ll notice at the bottom of this page is an area for you to leave your comments. Once your comments are posted, others can respond. Then, we may move your comments from the comments area at the body of the page to this page itself. You can see that the first comment already has been moved by scrolling down on this screen.
Have fun and let us know your thoughts.
Collection of Great Friends at the “Pre-Amelia” Meet Hosted at Fiberglass Farms in 2015
Guy Dirkin (9/25/19)
One of the first things I would do is to check that the axle centers are square and that the car’s rear wheels follow the front. These checks can be done in about half an hour with simple plumb bobs and a tape.
The goal is to find out if the chassis is square and not twisted, in any dimension. Most of the time, the chassis will not be perfect, but if it is acceptable the body can be mounted down the road in a way that the stance will look good. If the chassis is way off, it may be possible to correct it.
The other thing I would do is look at how the car was engineered and correct any life threatening faults and plan on fixing: e.g. suspension mounts in sheer that are not boxed. Cheap and simple to fix, most of the time.
At some point you have to walk away or build a chassis. I do not think it is worth cosmetically spending over a certain amount of total dollars if the car cannot drive down the road vs on to a show field.
With regards to body removal, I would first perform any need stabilizing repairs and bracing while the body is still mounted.
This is common practice with all metal vehicles, especially open top cars and rusted hulks. Of course, we fiberglass types don’t have the rust issue as a natural matter, but some plastic cars have embedded metal that can be seriously degraded; just look at the birdcage of an old leaky Corvette for example.
And take photos, lots and lots of photos, before you touch anything!
Hi Marc.
Thanks for your contribution here. We’ll keep building content here with help from you and others. No doubt you’ll have more to share as you begin the restoration on your Victress C3 Coupe.
Thanks for sharing….
Geoff Hacker
Undiscovered Classics