1968 RS Camaro Frame-Off Restoration
Car was ordered in April of 1968 and delivered a few weeks later to a dealership in Trussville, AL. I purchased it in the fall of 1987.
The car is a numbers matching car and I have a letter from the Camaro Club of America that confirms that based on the partial VIN stamped in the engine, transmission, and rear end. I have the last tag the original owner was running on the car and I have the original bill of sale from the dealership. I have the original owner manual with the protect-o-plate warranty card attached.
When I purchased the car, the blower motor made a noise . It was full of oak leaves. Cowl "tulips" where also packed full of decaying oak leaves and acorns. I removed the kick panels and got as much of the debris out as I could. I removed the trim around the wheel openings and found corrosion there. And some around the rear window. Drove the car intermittently for several years until I decided to restore it. That was around 1992. Removed the hood and both front fenders and did a better job of cleaning out the debris. And then I just kept removing stuff and boxing it up in cardboard boxes. Then I changed jobs and we moved to Florida. A moving company hauled the car to our new home where it stayed parked in the garage for 3 years. Moved back to Alabama in 1996 and this time I slapped the fender & hood back on and drove the Camaro because I did not want it to go through another round of amateur hour with a moving company. I mean seriously - when the ramp says "300 lbs weight limit" would you try to drive a car up on two of them? I wasn't going to go through that crap again. Just enough of the car was reassembled to make it road worthy (some would say not enough). It had a hood and fenders but not the inner fenders and only a single seat was installed. Everything else remained in boxes and the movers moved it. All told I think the car went through 5 moves. In one of those the hood got damaged because it was just piled on the back of a pickup truck on top of many other Camaro parts and it was not tied down well enough. It caught wind and ended up swinging around a while from the tie-down strap before I noticed it in my rear view mirror. Later in this series you see some pictures that show the details.
May 2007
By this time the engine had been out of the car for a few years and the car was just parked in the garage. It had become a place to store stuff on or in.
Removed the subframe and put the body up on jack stands.
Subframe sand-blasting
June 2008.
Started sand blasting the subframe in the driveway
Moved to the back yard
Rebuilt using urethane bushings. Broke the handle out of my hammer trying to get the old bushings out so I resorted to using heat.
Minor weld repairs before 2 coats of epoxy paint.
Cutting away the rot
POR 15 rust preventative
Very difficult to sand blast the bottom of the car with it propped up on a stack of wheels - at least that's what my son told me. So we built a rotisserie out of 3/16" wall square tube and angle iron. Used casters and cylinders from harbor freight. Old flywheel and the gear from a starter was used to make a hand-crank so we would roll it to any desired angle.
After we got the rear end removed and mounted the body on the rotisserie, it was much easier to work on. This shows the first time we rolled it out of the garage. Note the rear bracket attaches where the leaf spring shackles go. The body was top heavy (so it wanted to stay upside down). Made an adjustment to the rear bracket to make it easier to roll. In the long run we ditched the manual crank handle and just drilled holes in the flywheel at 15 degree increments. Manually rolled the body until one of those holes lined up with a hole in the rotisserie frame and put a bolt in it. With the CG right the bolt held the body at the desired angle very nicely. The body stayed on the rotisserie for rust repairs on the floor pan and both quarter panels. When not actively working on it, I rolled the body vertical and parked the car right up against the wall of our 2-car garage. Had the front fenders and the seats and all the window glass in the attic. Hood was against the wall. Work progressed very slowly for about 10 years.
A view from 'below' showing the floor pan after it was sand-blasted bare before getting 2 coats of PPG DPLF epoxy primer and 2 coats of black epoxy paint. Wheel wells are about to get a coat of gray POR-15.
Car on it's side for application of POR 15 to the cowl area.
Left wheel well with a fresh coat of POR 15. At this time the plan was to use fiberglass to rebuild the part that rusted away but I later decided to replace the quarter panels and part of the wheel well.
I have not found any in-progress pictures of the wheel well work but the process was pretty simple. Rather than replace the entire wheel well, I cut them about 1.5 inches "in" from the outer edge. This was enough to get rid of all the rust while maintaining all the intricate seams of the wheel well with the body. I then cut the replacement wheel wells using the piece of the old one as a guide. Next I welded the roughly 1.5 inch wide new metal to the old wheel well. Once both wheel wells were looking good, I replaced a portion of each quarter panel. Unlike most people I've seen who do quarters on these cars, I did not replace the entire quarter. Instead, I cut just about an inch below the main body line and about an inch behind the front edge (leaving the area where the door strike bolt is mounted). I continued the cut right along where the bottom trim goes. At the back of the car I did the same style of cut, keeping the existing seam intact. In the end I was able to get rid of all the rust while keeping enough structure to keep the body from warping under its own weight. I didn't weld in any braces because they were not needed. I used the piece of quarter panel I had cut out as a template to cut the new quarter panel to the same size & shape so it would fit in where the original piece had been. I started by making it about an inch too large. Then I positioned "inside" the hole and sprayed red oxide primer around the edge. This left a nice line to use as a guide to continue trimming the panel to fit the hole. Once I got it right, I did a but weld of the new metal into the body.
Paint coming off
Paint remover and scotch brite pad to get the old paint off.
Hood was damaged in a move. After chemical stripping you can see the diagonal mark on the right side. Slight damage to both rear corners as well but body work took care of it.
Original hood showing the black EDP after the butternut yellow and a coat of gray primer was removed.
November 2019
The picture below shows some "touch up" sand blasting because some surface rust had formed over the 4 or so years the car had been stored with no paint or primer on the new quarter panels. You can see my hair is much thinner and my beard is more blond now and I wear reading glasses instead of safety glasses. But still making progress.
Started driving it to work occasionally in 2023. This picture was tekan at work.
