My 1956 Chevrolet 210 (2-door sedan)
Where I got it: This car was given to me by my parents as a high school graduation gift in 1985. After I graduated, Dad and I worked on it all summer to get it ready for me to drive to college that fall. We did all the work ourselves, except for having the seats re-upholstered . We rebuilt the original 265ci 8-cylinder , did some minor body-work, and finally painted it " teal green ." I drove the car during my first three years of college , but garaged it my senior year to "save" it, once I bought a "daily driver" (a high-mileage 1984 Olds Cutlass Ciera that I've since sold).
What happened: Unfortunately, about a year after we had first painted it, the paint started peeling in several places. We quickly discovered that some previous owner had painted the car without doing the proper sanding and prep work. As a result, their paint was now peeling off and taking our paint with it!! The following summer we worked on the body, and thought we had found and "fixed" all the places where the old paint was coming off, so we repainted the car - this time in a medium blue . About 6 months later, it started peeling again.
The plan: After dealing with peeling paint twice, I was tired of it. I garaged the car with the intention of stripping it down to bare metal and totally restoring it from the ground up. Unfortunately, up until recently neither time nor money was available for such a project. After sitting in a garage for about 5 years, I'm finally working to properly restore the car, with lots of help from Dad. It's been slow going because my garage is too small to work on it, so it's in Dad's garage. Unfortunately my parents live 300 miles away in southern West Virginia. I've been working on it about one weekend a month, when I can go in for the weekend, and Dad has been working on it (too much, probably!!) in his spare time.
What we've done: First, we took the body off the frame , then sandblasted the frame and painted it black. Next, we stripped all the old paint off of the body with a chemical paint stripper (and some sandblasting). All four floorpans have been replaced , and we've hammered out several dents that had previously simply been filled with body filler instead of being properly straightened first.
Expected Completion: I'm hoping to finish the restoration sometime this summer (1999). By "finish" I mean "get it back on the road." Some things will be left for later, like upgrading to disc brakes, replacing some chrome that's imperfect, etc. One unexpected obstacle has been the discovery that several bolt holes on each head have cracked (where the bolts hold the head to the engine block). We haven't determined if they're repairable, and if not, I don't know if I'll get new heads or go with another (larger) engine entirely.
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