One of the pitfalls of buying a car sight unseen is that sometimes the car may be worse in areas than you were hoping. This was true with our project AE86. We were not upset because our car was complete and still in better shape than most AE86s for sale for the price we paid for it. However, once we started working on it, we found some bad body rot underneath Bondo and some okay-looking paint. A bad thing about restoring old cars like this is that NOS OEM sheetmetal is no longer available, but we were able to get some high quality Taiwanese reproduction parts for this car that are carried in the country by Battle Garage.
We took off the back bumper only to find that our rear panels had rotted all the way through.
We didn’t like the bubble flares our car came with and someone had crudely cut up the rear quarter panels to get tire clearance. We also found badly patched lower quarter panels with bad rust damage under cracking bondo. We decided to replace the quarter panels and the rear panels
We measured the frame and it was pretty straight but the lower core support was punched in and poorly straightened. It was also twisted. Since the TC rods bolt here, we decided that replacing it would be easier than trying to fix it. Zach Mallin from ZSM Custom is helping us with the chassis repairs and here he is drilling out the factory spot welds.
2 comments
That is super cool that good quality repair parts can still be found for that chassis. Rust and bondo are the absolute worst thing to find when trying to modify any car.
Zach is the best!! I wish I lived closer cause I’d love for him to do my roll cage!