Search the Community

Hello all. I have a 1979 Falcon XC project car that I've recently restarted work on, after a 10 year break. The car was incredibly full of rust, which I cut out and welded new steel in from 10 to 15 years ago, my weakness has always been body work, I don't have the patience to do that right. My 10 year break was caused by not having a garage, so the car was under my house for a few years, I had a garage built under there and had the car outside under a tarp for what should have been 6 weeks, but ended up 1 1/2 years and a lot of surface rust came back. I recently decided to go for a fully bare metal rat rod type of look for the car, wire wheeled actually for a dull look rather than shiny, with Boiled Linseed Oil and White Spirits to preserve the steel and surface rust. I like the look, the problem is that since I've stripped the bog off the car you can see the old dents on the C Pillar. I'm pretty sure my car was a paddock basher before I bought it and at some point hit a bank, it was repaired before I bought it, but due to the nature of this sort of thing, it'll never be straight again. I've got some pictures before, the bare metal is from a couple weeks ago, the black paint was from 11 years ago or so, just there to show the dents a bit easier. The structure under the panel is fine, it never needed to be repaired from what I can see. I've read and read the WOF rules, it talks about 5mm depth and 40mm wide dents being ok. This is a large dent pulled out (you can see the dent puller weld spots) so it's actually pretty flat, it just looks bad. A bit of filler over the top and you'd never know. I'm assuming I'll probably need to find someone to sign off this repair, but maybe someone else has already dealt with this sort of thing before and can tell me that it's not necessary? (I've painted rust converter on this and wire wheeled it, so it's not so bright and there's no stripper disk marks, this is a before picture of that) Here's a better look at the damage from 11 years ago: As a bonus, here's how the car looks now, on the other side. (I'll fix the dent on that side, it's an easy one)