1967 Eldorado Vinyl Roof Replacement & More!

[35-709]

Mine does well.  Lincoln also makes a nice small unit.  Remember you will still have to get a gas bottle for it.

[67_Eldo]

Remember you will still have to get a gas bottle for it.

Yup. Last night in the shop, a big, fresh bottle of gas fell over and knocked its valve off. It blasted itself across the width of a dealership-sized garage and smashed into a concrete wall on the other side of the shop. Thank goodness it missed three people who were working on that side of the building. It was a large torpedo whose thrust was in line with its launch-time 2000-psi pressure!

I'll never forget about welding gas again! :-)

[67_Eldo]

Pic #51 was taken during the cleanup of the rear window glass. Generations of butyl and silicone sealant had to come off as well as the overspray (primarily from the inside) when the previous owner got a bit too crazy painting the interior of the car white.

[nixiebunny]

Yup. Last night in the shop, a big, fresh bottle of gas fell over and knocked its valve off. It blasted itself across the width of a dealership-sized garage and smashed into a concrete wall on the other side of the shop.

I hope that someone in that shop learned an important safety lesson. I work around those cylinders at a university, and we ALWAYS chain or strap them to the wall. Now we know why.

[67_Eldo]

The five-day repair estimate has now turned into six weeks. I took the rear glass to the shop so they can fit it into the car ... soon?

While I was there, I snapped photos of the work so far. The windshield was removed for sandblasting. No new holes were found up there (or in back) so that was a relief.

My notion of driving the Eldorado from Kansas to California and back in the first week of August has taken quite a hit!

[67_Eldo]

ARRRGH!

So they're still plugging away at the Eldorado's rear window. Last Monday I delivered the rear window and rear-window trim for them to install. I visited the shop today to take a peek. The fellow working on it seems to be diligently going about the task of smoothing everything out with filler. He's a good guy.

Then he said, "I'm glad you brought that trim in. Your rear-window opening was about an inch too wide at the top, leaving quite a gap on either side of the window opening. I'm filling in the gap (with putty) and making it so the trim fits perfectly."

Of course, I immediately said "Great!" I want to get the car back someday with as few gaps as possible. They've already had it seven weeks for an estimated five-day job.

But then I thought about the rear-window opening. I have stared at that opening pretty much every day for at least six months. I know every millimeter of it by heart. There's no way that a rear-window opening could suddenly expand by an inch. There wasn't any rust up there. No metal was taken out of that part of the top. The sheet metal on a 50-year-old Cadillac may change shape a bit, but not by an inch across a rear-window opening. However, he was the expert.

This bugged me all afternoon. Then I remembered how I could check the situation: The 1967 Body by Fisher manual! Sure enough, he had overlooked the little corner sheet-metal pieces that fit into the top left and right corners of the rear-window opening. Without those corner pieces, you'd lose almost exactly an inch of rear-window trim coverage at the top of the glass!

AARRRRGH!

Of course I figured this out about 30 minutes after they'd closed for the day. So now I'm facing an evening of torment as I wait for them to open tomorrow morning ... to begin grinding away the putty they've been mistakenly putting into place for the last few days!

[DeVille68]

 

Do you have a page reference in the manual? I would like to look this up just out of curiosity.

[67_Eldo]

1967 Body by Fisher Service Manual, Chapter 17, page 121, Fig. 17-125, #17.

[wrench]

Maybe print out the relevant pages for this task and any other task that the shop is doing for you and hand the copies to them to reference as they perform the tasks.

May help prevent a re-occurrence of this sort of thing...

[67_Eldo]

Yup. You hate to insult their automotive knowledge right off the bat, though.

Every time I've taken it somewhere, I've told them, right up front, that all the extant documentation for that car is hanging from the flash drive on the keyring. They say "Cool!"

Then they never use it.

In this case, the shop's "show car" is a 1967 Riviera. I told them they'd even find Riviera body documentation in the same PDF file.

"Cool!"

[wrench]

I think in some shops, referring to technical data is considered a sign of weakness. Or the boss thinks you are wasting time and
not working on the car.

Of course, I am my most productive when I am doing research and reviewing the manual for the operation I am in the process
of.

In my industry, you don't specifically have to demonstrate knowledge, your have to demonstrate you know where to gain the knowledge.

Big difference in attitude. Nobody knows everything, but you should know where to find it.

This forum would be one example. You can see some techs reach out here  and ask questions.

I was kind of surprised at the one guy asking about the interior lights and he said he replaced the stop light switch and when it didn't fix the problem he started checking for power and ground and that's where he started to realize he was over his head.

I could write a doctoral thesis on Troubleshooting. And now, the basics are even more important with complex systems because the built in test usually points you in the wrong direction.

[67_Eldo]

I got the car back! I didn't enjoy waiting 7 weeks past the 5-day original schedule but I'm happy enough right now not to care.

They did a fine job.

They were (justifiably) proud of their work. They also offered me a job forming sheet metal, thanks to the work I did creating the replacement sail panels they installed.

They wrapped up our meeting with the obvious: This is going to be one heckuva beautiful car when I'm finished. :-)

[Bentley]

Looks great! Are you planning on painting it?

[67_Eldo]

Yes. I'm going to repaint it the original Grecian White.

I still have lots of body work to do, however. So it will be a while before the paint goes on.

Thanks!

[67_Eldo]

I had to rewire the dash so I can ... rewire the dash.

At least I once again know how much gas I have in the tank!

[DeVille68]

nice! 

[67_Eldo]

Here's a long, pictureless summary of what has happened so far, including labor and $$ estimates based on *my* experience.

Your costs will probably be higher but your workers probably won't take nearly as much time as mine have. :-)

-----
As one of my two body-shop gurus kept saying, "Do you LOVE this car? I mean really LOOOOOOVE this car? 'Cause you better!"

Checking for rust is an imprecise affair. I assume you're seeing bubbles underneath the vinyl. Carefully prod those with your finger to see how "crunchy" they are. The more crunch, the worse your problem. Also run middling-strength magnets over the surface and see if there are sections where the magnet suddenly has no pull. That will be another trouble spot.

If you must take a peek underneath the vinyl, make sure you do it in an inconspicuous spot. Once you start pulling hard on the vinyl, there's no going back (easily or satisfactorily).

Every car and repair person is unique so my numbers might not apply to your situation. YMMV.

To work on rust, all the existing trim -- inside and out -- must be removed. In my case, I even removed the window-cranking mechanism for the quarter-windows. All the external chrome, the internal trim, and the headliner should come out. You should do that work carefully because it isn't easy to find replacements for some of those parts. If the rust is close to the windshield or rear window, the glass has to come out too because it is very likely that the window channel has rusted as well.

In my case, I'd say that my trim-removal preparation time would have been billed at 24 hours. I did it myself so I spent much more real-world time than that on this stage.

Then you pull the vinyl. In my case, two of us simply grabbed the vinyl and yanked. In other cases, having someone simultaneously blast the vinyl with a heat gun would be helpful. This is probably the easiest part of the whole process.

Without the vinyl, the top's surface will now be a combination of padding and adhesive. This crud has to be chemically removed or sandblasted lest your sanding equipment get gunked up with goo. I used a citrus-based adhesive cleaner. Even though the citrus stuff is "more gentle" than other removers, don't let it run down onto any paint (e.g. on the doors, trunk) that you want to preserve. It took 3 - 4 passes of the adhesive remover before I was down to ... body putty. That would probably be booked at 8 hours of labor.

Even though a vinyl-topped car may not be painted underneath the vinyl, the factory still has to smooth out any imperfections in the metal before applying the top. So there will probably be a thin (or not) layer of finishing putty over the primer. In my case, a prior owner had already taken an amateurish stab at replacing the vinyl top. He probably realized (too late) what he had gotten himself into and therefore laid on the putty pretty thick in the rusty sections *he* discovered.

At this point you have a couple of options:

* Sandblast the top. This is the preferred option if you can find a sandblaster who knows what he is doing. There is a huge downside to sandblasting, though: It will leave sand *everywhere* in your car. In my case, since I already had the car fairly well disassembled inside and I wasn't too concerned about the survival of the existing carpeting and dashboard mechanicals, I could live with it. But if I had a pristine interior that I didn't want to mess with, I'd be reluctant to expose it to a cloud of fine sand.

* Chemically treat & scrape & grind the top. This won't fill your interior with quite as much particulate material (although you should still seal up what you can to guard against the grinder's output). But it is lots of work and takes much more time.

Of course, I ultimately used both processes. I started with the treat & grind routine and then turned it over to folks who wanted to sandblast it.

If I was a pro, I'd have probably charged 16 hours for a treat & grind. For sandblasting, I think they charged me 2 hours (to go over what I'd already done). I'll say that a pro sandblast without the prior grinding would have taken 4 pro hours.

In my case, the sandblasting revealed no more problems. My windshield channel was OK, although there were the deep pits through the roof (up by the windshield) that I'd already discovered.

The two biggest problems were the sail panels and the rear-window channel.

* There are no sheet-metal reproduction sail panels available for a 1967 Eldorado. So I made them from scratch using the body-shop class's English Wheel. (First, I had to learn how to work an English Wheel!) The compound curves of the sail panels are not complicated on the Eldorado, but it still took me about 8 hours each to fabricate them. It probably would have taken a pro 4 hours each for a total of 8 hours fabrication time.

* The lower half of the rear-window channel wasn't in good health but the upper half was acceptable. There are no reproductions of rear-window channels either, so I fabricated various pieces and welded them into place. It took me a long time to carefully cut out the old rot and weld in new material, but it probably would have taken a pro only around 8 hours.

I removed the rear-window trim and cleaned off all of the various adhesives that had been applied over the years. There were also adhesives and other gunk smeared all around the edges of the rear-window glass. I'm guessing that it would have taken a pro about 2 hours to clean off all the old sticky crap from the various pieces. It took me two days because I didn't know which chemicals would work best. My garage is now a huge chemistry set!

Now we're at the point where we can start putting things back together. From here on, somebody else did the work.

They cut out the old sail-panel sheet metal and welded in my new replacements.

There were a few holes (about 1/4" diameter) that were filled in by welding.

Smaller holes, wavy sections of steel, and the carefully fitted regions around the windows were puttied over with All Metal body putty. (All Metal is putty that also contains bits of metal).

New clips were installed to hold the trim pieces that surround the windshield and rear window.

The whole kit and caboodle, front to back, was then sanded down and primed. White paint (the color of the car) was sprayed around the window channels so those channels would match the color of the rest of the car once I'm ready to get the whole thing painted.

A glass company installed the windshield and rear window, using the proper little metal-to-glass spacers and urethane sealant. (Nobody now uses the butyl rubber goo that GM used in the 1960s to seal the windows.)

This last section (in which I did none of the work) was billed at 36 hours. This was a screaming deal (although they spent eight weeks to put in the 36 hours).

Total estimated "pro" hours for my specific project = 66 (over a real-world span of 9 months)

This seems to align with the pros (who all declined to do the complete job) who were giving me estimates of 40 hours + undefined prep time to cover all the bases.

This does not include stitching and gluing a new vinyl top back on. One fellow estimated that to put a good vinyl top on would add another $1k in labor, plus the material cost of whatever vinyl was chosen, to the tab.

=====
THE MONEY PART

Therefore, if you are doing none of the work and your sheet metal was as (relatively) good as mine was, I'd expect a tab of $10k for a car with no vinyl (assuming your labor cost is around $100/hr).
If you have to replace the entire sheet-metal top, add another $3k (minimum).
=====

And I'm still not done.

* Headliner (and roof sound deadening) needs to be installed. I'm going to use Dynamat up there. Dynamat isn't cheap.
* Reinstall the mechanisms and glass for the quarter-panel windows.
* Intall the weatherstripping around the windows and doors. On a 67 Eldorado, this involves multiple layers of weatherstripping ("fuzzy" brushes and rubber gaskets).
* Redo interior and exterior trim for all the windows (front, back, and side)
* The courtesy lights (top and sail panel) need to be cleaned, rewired, and reinstalled.
* All those crazy little interior pieces need to be rounded up and popped back into place.
* The interior needs, at a minimum, to be vacuumed to within an inch of its life.
  [Sand will continue to fall from little crevices forever more.]
* Rear speakers need to be installed.
* The Parcel Shelf (which I've already redone) needs to be installed.
* The Dash Pad (with stereo speakers) needs to be attached (once I've overhauled my Instrument Cluster).
* Everything else I currently can't recall.

Executive Summary: It is quite a job. Find people you can trust!

[Mike Josephic CLC #3877]

All I can say is WOW!!  That made me tired just reading
all that was done.

Thanks for the summary and keeping us posted on your
progress.  This will be a real "eye opener" for folks that
think this is a easy 1-2-3 job -- also expensive.

I don't know what the labor cost at a reputable restoration
shop is these days.  About 10-15 years ago it was in the
$50-$75 / hour range, depending on the type of work.
You saved yourself a bundle.

Keep us posted as you go to the finish line!

Mike

[67_Eldo]

I don't know what the labor cost at a reputable restoration
shop is these days.  About 10-15 years ago it was in the
$50-$75 / hour range, depending on the type of work.

The average hourly work quote I was given was $100/hr. The custom hot-rod shops were closer to $125/hr while the place that actually did my work charged closer to $60/hr.

The tradeoff seems to be that, if they charge a higher hourly rate, then the job will be a top priority until it is finished. The custom shop would have completed this work within a week. The place I used apparently viewed my car as a lower priority. Hence the eight-week real-world time.

[DeVille68]

Thanks for the write-up!