I found some pictures of my lead queen at Concorso Italiano in Pebble Beach a couple of years before I bought it! I still have the certificate. It look pretty good on the outside, but underneath!!!!!!!
From the way it looked, (This is also the way it looked when I bought it) one could never tell how bad it was underneath, and how much lead was on the car. If I count how much we took out from the sills, I say we probably come close to 200 Lbs. The sills were full of it to hide the horrible bodywork. Of course most of the rust was left under all this. The paint, although still ok, showed a lot of waves, or overfill which I attributed at the time to having been painted repeatedly without being stripped all the way to bear metal. I have learned a lot since that time! Notice how skinny and slopping the wing lips are, there is over a 1/2 inch of lead around them, and yet it does not look that bad! Sometimes, I wonder if it was all worth it to do that much work, but considering how rare and gorgeous 428 are, and how they drive when properly set up I say it was. Also, I attributed the ill fitting bumpers as to them being bent, when it was the other way around, the car was too fat and that made the bumpers seem wrong. Somebody should invent an portable instrument, probably X-ray based which would detect the amount of filler and type, lead, Bondo, etc and which would clearly show what the bodywork looks like underneath. There is already such device used on aircraft to detect cracks but it's huge and very expensive.
Actually, here you can see how wavy the car is on the left side. Look at the reflection of the grass, it's all distorted.
And the boot:
Can anyone tell me if the boot is supposed to look like this or if it is supposed to be paneled? It may depend whether the car is an early or late model!
Emmanuel [
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