by Earl Swift
Paul reaches for one of three pieces of new aftermarket steel that will together form the tailgate’s jamb. It doesn’t fit. He attempts to finesse it into position a half-dozen different ways, but concludes that there’s simply not enough room—not, at least, with the body bolted to the frame, which is so stiff an arrangement that there’s no flex to the space the piece is supposed to slip into. A possible solution: lift the body off the frame, position the new metal, and lower the body back down. He slides back under the car, unscrews all the bolts holding the body to the chassis, then rolls a huge floor jack under the body. The jack has little room to do its job—with a rise of three or four inches, it bumps into the frame, and can rise no more—so Paul balances a one-foot cube of wood on its cup, and tops that with another thick block standing on end, and with this extension wedged hard against the body’s belly with the jack at its lowest position, again pumps the handle. It’s a lethally unsteady solution, but the body rises the needed few inches clear of its seat.
Unfortunately, even now the piece won’t fit, so Paul resorts to trimming with the whiz wheel. He widens the opening at the car’s rear by a half inch, slips the brace into place, forces it home with a sharp pull and a grunt. Hammers the brace a quarter inch to the left. Clamps the assembly in place.
Before welding the brace to the body, he has to be sure everything fits, so he and Tippit now carry the two-door wagon’s heavy tailgate into the shop. Paul lacks bolts with which to attach it—Arney says he’s ordered a bolt kit, but it has yet to arrive—which provokes a stream of muttering about the “fucking bullshit” Paul has to endure before he stalks back out to the two-door and scavenges bolts from its door hinges.
It all fits perfectly. In fact, within a few hours, Paul welds in the brace, installs the other two sections of jamb, and wipes, sands, and primes the whole rear end. When I venture into the shop the next morning, the results exceed the craftsmanship achieved by Fisher Body on its best days.
Tippit has spent two hours sandblasting the hatch and donated tailgate, which are now the dull, gunmetal gray of bare steel. Paul decides to first repair the hatch, which is perforated with tiny rust holes, too many to fill, on its bottom and inside surfaces. Tippit gives him a ride to the drugstore, where he buys a sheet of blue poster board, cuts it to fit the exact shape of the hatch’s damaged bottom, and, using a permanent marker, traces around this template on a fresh sheet of eighteen-gauge steel. Now he takes his whiz wheel and carves the sheet slowly, carefully, along the line. The shop fills with an asbestos stink, like overheated brakes, as the wheel advances. Sparks gush over Paul’s oil-streaked jeans and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt.
He grinds the surface rust from the finished piece and primes it gray from a spray can. While it dries, he takes the whiz wheel to the hatch, cutting away the matching bottom panel, then tack-welds the new metal panel over the hole. He grinds the edge of the new metal and pounds it round and smooth with a hammer, then goes back over the seams with spot welds, the steel glowing orange. By afternoon’s end, the hatch looks new.
Over the next few days, Paul rehabilitates the tailgate in like fashion, and welds steel sheeting into the sides of the cargo hold, and cuts and shapes and installs a new windowsill for the car’s right rear corner, and replaces a piece of the left fin in an attempt to correct the bulge, and patches a hole in the right rear wheel well, then grinds it smooth.
The restoration is racing along now. It’s easy to forget Arney’s reputation for foot-dragging. Painter Paul’s prediction that the work would take years seems not only wrong, but maybe a little unkind.
LATE IN AUGUST 2011, Hurricane Irene sweeps past the Carolina coast not far east of Moyock. Its eighty-knot winds peel the big sign on the front of the Quonset from its plywood backing, but otherwise the close brush with disaster does wonders for the car lot—when I pull onto the property two days later, it looks as if it’s been swept and mopped. The pad outside Painter Paul’s shops is pristine. I walk the bug-infested moor behind the Quonset, which before Irene was littered with trash and small debris. There’s not so much as a gum wrapper on the ground.
Arney has Skinhead repair the sign and, sensing pressure from Currituck County to get started on the improvements he has yet to make—or even think much about—devotes the next ten days to augmenting the storm’s work. The crew cuts the grass, chops up a walk-in cooler and carts it off, hauls away cars. They pull back the Jersey wall that runs along the lot’s frontage. Painter Paul has no time for the wagon.
But that changes. I arrive at Moyock on an early September Saturday just ahead of a fellow in a Ford Ranger, on the door of which is painted “Bobby Chapman’s Glass & Upholstery,” along with a phone number. Chapman, a compact fellow in his fifties, steps from his truck and shakes hands with Arney. They’ve known each other since the eighties, when Chapman did upholstery work for other men’s shops in Norfolk, before he opened his own. He’s been Arney’s go-to man for automotive interiors for much of the time since.
The two walk back to the body shop to look over the Chevy, and afterward stop to eyeball the rusted California wagon parked outside. Chapman is excited by its seats. “This looks good,” he tells Arney. They walk to a house a few yards from the shops, a modular place that serves as a storage shed for the wagon’s disassembled pieces. The original seats lean against a wall in the living room. Not bad, Chapman says, though at a light touch, dried foam geysers from the holes where the birds nested. The others are better, but these will work—the metal frames are intact, which is all he needs.
Okay, Arney says, here’s what he’ll do: When Painter Paul is close to finishing the bodywork, he’ll move four cars out of the showroom so that Chapman has room to set up an upholstery operation. Winter’s coming. That’ll give Chapman a place to work, no matter the weather.
Ordered back to the wagon, Paul muds the right quarter panel with silicone putty and smooths it with a handheld sanding block while it’s still damp. The block is wrapped in coarse sandpaper that produces a shower of stringy beige shavings, dead ringers for sawdust, and Paul pauses now and then to clean its grit with a wire brush. Once the putty dries, he replaces the block with a pneumatic sander. Roiling clouds of dust erupt from the car’s fins to burn the eyes, inflame the throat.
He stops every couple of minutes to run a hand over the car’s skin, checking for invisible bulges and declivities—the sort of imperfections that are masked by the gray primer’s matte finish but will be all too apparent under highly reflective paint. He returns to hand-sanding, this time with finer sandpaper wrapped around a thick wooden dowel, with which he’s able to navigate the curving flare of the cutout for the rear wheel.
He blows the dust from the quarter panel with the hose from his air compressor, then sprays a light “guide coat” of black paint over the metal. When he hand-sands over it, dark patches remain, advertising low spots on the skin. I watch as he prepares another batch of putty, mixing gold filler and deep orange-red hardener on a steel palette, and slaps it onto the quarter panel—then again sands it, blocks it, paints it with guide coat, and blocks it some more, while the radio squawks out static-distorted Bad Company, Heart, and Van Halen. Then he does it again.
Four rounds of mudding, sanding, and blocking takes all of a morning and afternoon, and leaves Paul physically spent. He takes a half-hour break before finishing the quarter with a top layer of finishing putty, or “icing”—a fine glaze that will fill pinholes remaining in the Chevy’s skin, along with any subtle striations left by his sanding. Paul trowels the runny, light gray goop over the already smooth body. It dries as hard as glass. He sprays on a guide coat, loads even finer sandpaper to his pneumatic sander, and achieves what seems a flawless smoothness to the Chevy’s right fin.
We break for lunch at close to suppertime, and I drive him down Route 168 to a Subway sandwich shop. He’s a regular customer, and friendly with the stooped old-timer who runs the place. “What are you working on?” the manager asks.
“I’m still
working on that ’57,” Paul replies.
The manager looks surprised. “Shit,” he says, “you gonna retire on that car?”
I realize to my own surprise that it’s been six months since Paul started the restoration.
“Man,” Paul says, “you have no idea how much there was to do.”
FOR THE NEXT ten days, Paul smooths successive parts of the car. It is slow, tedious, and hard on every part of his body—he spends hours kneeling on the shop’s concrete, mudding and blocking the wagon’s flanks. I’m driving down to the car lot to watch him work on the left fender when I get a call from Arney announcing that the Daily Advance, a newspaper serving Elizabeth City, the biggest Carolina town in these parts, a half hour’s drive from Moyock, has published a story about him on its front page—Currituck County is suing him for $78,800, the story says, for failing to satisfy its many demands at Moyock Muscle. This, despite the cleanup he and the crew accomplished in recent days—it’s low-down, he tells me, and chickenshit, to pull such a stunt when it’s obvious he’s making efforts to comply with the county’s stupid rules. “I didn’t even know they were making the fucking fines official until I heard there was this story in the newspaper,” he snarls into the phone. “It’s just a pain in the fucking ass. It fucks up a good morning.” He promises to put on his “ass-kicking shoes” for a “battle at the Moyock Muscle Corral.”
But within a few hours, such a rush of customers descends on the lot that Arney calls Paul to the front to help him handle the influx. Two days later, it’s still going strong, and I find Arney in high spirits in the Quonset office. “I wish the fucking county sued me every week,” he says. “We’ve had people coming in here all day yesterday and all this morning. Seriously: This has been fucking unbelievably good for business.”
Over lunch, Arney assures me that the bodywork won’t take much longer. He’s eager to paint. “We’re what—no more than thirty days, Paul?”
“Oh, yeah,” Paul says.
Arney nods, folds his hands behind his head. “Inside of thirty days, we’ll throw some paint on it.” What color it’ll be—well, that remains a question. Arney tells us that yesterday, as he admired the bright paint on his cars in the warehouse across the highway, he became worried that the gray and silver scheme would “diminish” the wagon, would fail to announce itself with sufficient volume. “Some color of yellow would look good,” he muses. “Orange would look good.”
He leans back in his chair, thinking. “Orange would look fucking great,” he murmurs. He looks over at me. “I had an orange wagon when I was young, and I should never have sold that fucking car. That was a beautiful motherfucking car, and my dumb ass sold it so I could buy my first wrecker.”
Five of those thirty days later, Painter Paul finishes mudding and sanding the wagon’s sides. He welds new metal into the rust-eaten slots of the gunsights on the hood, grinds the additions, muds and sands. I watch him clean up the gutter he welded weeks ago to the right rear corner of the roof, after borrowing it from the California wagon. He subjects it to the same exhaustive cycle of smoothing, using a thinner dowel wrapped in sandpaper to block its rain channel, running a finger in the hollow every few minutes to check for burrs or wrinkles.
Nearly seven months after he started, he’s fitted the wagon with new fenders, a new floor pan, rebuilt doors, new rockers and rear jambs, and a rebuilt tailgate and hatch. It has been purged of rust, and its holes patched or filled with fresh metal. The whole has been sanded smooth and sheathed in pale gray primer. In fit and finish, in the strength of its body panels, in the armor provided by its undercoatings, it is a much finer car than rolled out of Baltimore fifty-four years ago.
Now it’s time to break it in two.
IF YOU’RE DRIVING an automobile made in the last thirty years, odds are that it doesn’t have a frame—that is, a heavy steel spine to which the engine is mounted, the body is fastened, and the suspension and axles are attached. Rather, its foundation likely is incorporated into its body, in the form of stiffening spines stamped into its floor pan, so that body and frame are inseparable partners in a single welded steel box. This is commonly called unibody or unitary construction, and because it is lighter, more fuel efficient, and absorbs more energy in accidents, has become the standard in passenger cars since the seventies.
An older American car, on the other hand, has two distinct pieces—its body, and the chassis to which that body is bolted. In the Chevy’s case, the frame consists of four beefy steel girders welded into a rectangle; this skeleton provides the car with the structural muscle to resist flex when trundling over railroad crossings or making fast turns, and to bear the vehicle’s many weighty components. The arrangement is called body-on-frame construction, and while it has fallen out of favor with automobile manufacturers, it remains the standard in pickups, large SUVs, and heavy trucks.
Most automotive restorations restrict themselves to freshening the parts of a car that its owner directly experiences, namely the body, paint, interior, and running gear. But anyone committed to achieving like-new results takes the process further—he undoes its birth on the assembly line, that critical moment when, in the wagon’s case, the body from Cleveland was dropped onto its chassis in Baltimore. He separates the car’s halves in a “body-off” restoration.
This is an obsessive undertaking by definition, for it bespeaks a level of effort that likely will go unwitnessed and underappreciated; once the body is returned to its chassis, the triumphs of the work will be rendered invisible. It also requires time, special equipment, and a pile of money that often dwarfs any prospect of recovery through a vehicle’s sale. But it is the only way, when restoring a body-on-frame vehicle, to achieve perfection—to sandblast and repaint the frame and arrest every last speck of its rust; to sand the body’s every last nook; to leave no bolt uninspected and uncleaned. The result, in every respect but technological modernity, is a new car.
Painter Paul begins the process by removing the pieces he has so carefully mated to the car’s body core. He takes off the doors, hood, hatch, tailgate, and fenders and deposits them with great care on the floor of the body shop. He unfastens all the bolts linking the new floor pan to the frame. He rolls the Chevy onto the apron outside, where he spends close to an hour grunting and cussing before he successfully disengages the steering column, which threads through a hole in the firewall, from the assembly that steers the front wheels.
Now he faces a thorny challenge: how to get the body off. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he tells me as we eye the car. “Thought about it all night.” The lot is short of helpers today—Arney’s away, and Skinhead’s busy moving cars around up front, dragging them farther from the highway to mollify the county; Bobby Tippit has been absent for days, having been furloughed by Arney for unspecified failings. I’m the only assistance he’s going to have, except for the lot’s small Bobcat tractor.
And it’s unclear how he can use the Bobcat. He can fit the tractor with forklift blades, but to hoist the body from underneath might crease it. We’re discussing the difficulty of the situation when Skinhead happens by in the wrecker. “You ain’t got that thing off of there yet?” he asks from behind the wheel.
Painter Paul explains the problem. Skinhead considers the matter for maybe two seconds. “Why don’t you get some nylon straps,” he suggests, “and lift it by its top?”
“Hey, son—that might work,” Paul cries. “I’m glad I had you around today.”
“The top will take the weight?” I ask.
Paul shrugs. “Hope so.” He assesses the wagon’s roof and the eight slender pillars, four to a side, on which it rests. “It should,” he says. If he places the straps close to the B and C pillars, which run vertically and close to the car’s middle—the B pillar runs between the doors, and the C just behind the backseat—he should have the strongest part of the roof supporting the body’s weight. “The thing ain’t that heavy,” he says, more to himself than to me.
He attaches forklift
blades to the Bobcat, drives the tractor onto the pad, and sits in the cab for a moment, squinting at the wagon; then, forgoing the nylon straps Skinhead prescribed, he eases the blades through the car’s empty door openings, tilts them until they’re parallel with the roof, and slowly raises them until they make gentle contact. He shifts a lever and the body rises smoothly off the frame; Paul lifts it eight feet in the air, jumps out of the Bobcat, and rolls the chassis out of the way with a shove.
In its place we position a wheeled steel contraption that resembles a combat-ready tea trolley. It lacks a tabletop; instead, its legs are welded to crossbars, which form parallel rails across the trolley’s top. It looks as if it might have been designed to transport plywood or glass panes, but whatever its original purpose, it’s less than an ideal tool for the task at hand. Atop the trolley’s rails are a pair of four-by-fours, held fast with turn after turn of duct tape. Paul intends to rest the car on these short sections of lumber. The car’s welfare, and months of work, will rely on the strength of this rather shaky-looking assembly. As he tells me: “We’re gonna see how strong that duct tape is.”
To complicate matters, if he simply lowers the Chevy onto the trolley, it will come to rest with its rear foot wells, which bulge lower than the rest of the floor pan’s bottom, on the four-by-fours. The bulges will almost surely be crushed under the body’s weight. Paul devises a typically Moyock Muscle solution: He scrounges several planks of wood from his shops and the weedy ground outside the buildings, lays three heavy planks across the top of the trolley, then positions stacked four-by-fours on top of these crosswise planks and outside the foot wells.
