OEM Terror...Our '09 SEMA project

I got a call from the painter this morning and the body work is pretty much all wrapped up. They had to cut back the door edges to set the gaps perfect. There was a lot of work on the side of the truck, mainly around the door handles and the rear quarter panels around the wheel wells. It's amazing how decent stuff looks from the factory, yet when you start blocking them down you find all of the imperfections! I'm going to go up next week to with the owner to try to pick out colors for it, I'll try to sneak some photos...

So I've got some bad news. We've decided to skip SEMA this year. It seems as if the six remaining weeks isn't quite enough to pull off the level of perfection that we're shooting for in the paint and body work. Between a new paint scheme, all new colors in the works, figuring out door jamb breakup of paint design, having to grind and weld to re-gap all the doors perfect and on top of that about 6 hides of leather, there just isn't enough time to pull it off without sacrificing quality. We still want to put a lot of small details into it all upon assembly and we're not ready to show it until it's 100% done this time around! We've set a date for a formal debut for the Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona, a show I believe to be the best of the year (at least it always seems to be)!

Anyways, here's some photos since that's what everyone likes looking at anyways...







And some under-hood pieces all waiting to be blocked.



If it makes anyone feel better, we will be bringing this supercharged Pontiac Powered GTO!

not cool.....

It sucks that you cant make your deadline for SEMA but your better off taking your time and doing everything right instead of rushing it just to make it out to a show. No matter what how long it takes you to finish it or what show you debut at i'm pretty sure the final product will be sick just like the rest of your other builds.

Is this thing finished yet???

Finished? No. Still getting worked on, yes. We've had a real tough time drawing the line on this project and the owner want's it to stand up to nice muscle cars and hot rods as far as quality, workmanship and details go. We've been given the, "take the time you need (within reason) and make it close to perfect" order. The paint went further then we expected. The stock bodies on these aren't very straight from the factory so there's a lot of hours in blocking before they were able to start painting. They also had to adjust almost all of the door gaps, adding and removing material where needed. The car was completely gutted for the color change. Sunroof and all the glass pulled out, doors, hatch and frontend pulled off. The two tone goes through every surface on the truck, it turned out extremely nice!

There's still a few pieces we're waiting to get back from the painter. We've been tinkering on assembly and machining hardware in the meantime.

There's going to be close to 200 custom pieces of hardware total in this project when we're done. This is half of what it takes to assemble one side of the front end (fenders, inner fender, grille, bumper, etc...)

We also decided while assembly that brushed nickle trim would be the way the way to go, so so long to all the chrome!

Some machined super slim hardware for the door latches

After wetsanding and buffing, it still needs a final, but it turned out amazing!

Is he putting Billets on then or keeping the Slides? And the work is awesome and very clean but why the RBP knock off grill?

Ball'in man