1928 Ford Model A Rat Rod Body Reworking

With this post I'm introducing my 1928 Ford Model A Rat Rod, as well as detailing some body work (rework?) I did on it.

Here's the car:

 As you can see, it's pretty bad ass!

These are the finished pics, after I reworked and painted it.

The problem was that the body plastic was cracking out due to a decade plus of mad vibration and general wear and tear. The paint was also cracking off in spots. Here's some detailed shots of the problems:

 The cracked paint was only in three or four spots.

 The body filler cracking was the major problem. It existed all over the vehicle. I'll detail the complete repair of this particular spot, then show some overall shots through the process lower down.

So the fix began with a wire wheel on a 4" grinder to grind all the damaged areas down to the metal.

Then with the trusty welder I welded all the holes closed to add some strength to the body so that this issue doesn't recur.

After that it was time to prime the repaired spots so rust didn't start in the short term while I worked the car over.

After that I applied body filler, then sanded, then filled, then sanded, and so on until you could not see the repair from any angle. I finished with 300 grit sand paper. That's probably pretty low for automotive work, but on a rat rod, the end result was seamless with it.

Once it was sanded smooth, it was primer time. For that I just used a rattle can of automotive gray primer.

Here's some post paint shots of the same spot. As you can see, 100 times better!

I followed those steps on a decent percentage of the total car surface. It had these cracking issues everywhere. Here's some overall WIP shots of the effort:

The end result is night and day better than where it was. The car got a paint job after all this was done, and while it's definitely still a rat rod, it doesn't look like it's falling apart any more!

You can scroll back up to the top of this post to see the finished shots.