Here are some pictures of the Torino as we started to dismantle it. As you can see this car needed a lot of work to achieve our goal ofa concourse restoration. The body work was extensive. Nearly all of the parts that made it the 429 super cobra jet monster it was born as had been robbed and replaced with generic auto part store items. There was going to be a lot of searching for exclusive super cobra jet parts for this car.

The next group of photos show us completing the body work. They also show the car now in primer and ready to be block sanded for the first time. The first item in our restoration process is to de-trim a car. This is followed by doing an initial panel alignment. This gives us a very good idea of how things are fitting now and where body work needs to be done on the car. Without doing this very important step you can be fitting the alognment throughout the rest of the restoration. Next in our process is to strip a car panel by panel. We want the car to be in bare metal for as short of time as possible in order to avoid unseen rust that only appears after weeks or months. The shows up after the car has left here and is the hands of our clients. this would be a serious tradegy after a client has payed us thousands to restore his car and now after months of looking perfect small bubbling or popping starts to show because of poor preperation. After one panel is striped the bodywork is completed on that panel and then it is primered right away to avoid future problems. After each panel has been straightened to exacting standards and primed it is block sanded for the first time. We go through this process two more times with each blocking done with a finer grit sand paper. The final blocking is done by a process called wet sanding.

After the undercarriage has been clean and prepared we use a red oxide primer to duplicate the original process the was done at the Ford factory.

Here are a few shots of the undercarriage after we applied the base coat. You can see that the yellow base coat has left some over sprayon the undercarriage. This is exactly how the car looked when it left the factory. The factory never taped off the undercarriage so they would leave some body color. this would thin out out to nothing as it reached the transmission tunnel.