1938 Pontiac Coupe Start To Finish Build

i picked up this pontiac in the summer of 2019 i um with the intent that i was going to chop it and lower it i wanted to bag it originally so this is kind of what my plan was but after realizing i uh got it to the shop i cut all the springs out and this was the best stance i can get out of it i realized the fenders weren't deep enough like a chevy to be able to bag the car properly so i decided to go static or the plan was to go static i proceeded to give it a four inch chop so this was like the start of my chop this was before i was doing youtube um yeah so [Music] basically this is the stages where i got and uh and then i started doing my youtube thing so hope you enjoy the video [Music] gonna start on actually i've started already but uh the 38 pontiac uh the game plan i've already chopped it it's got a four inch chop cut all the springs out of it because i was trying to see how low i could get the car uh i'm going to turn it into a three window that's the plan you can see the chop nothing's finished i'm trying to figure out how to do this body line i'm not sure it's got a weird molded drip line drip rail on it so i'm working on that in my head anyways uh i've chopped the back window just three inches i've got some of the shapes started kind of started it i don't know a couple months ago [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so all the cutting i'm doing around there this is what i'm actually doing is getting rid of cutting off the crappy unused steel that i have so that's pretty much but now it's just a straight butt well there's still a little piece here but it's because i haven't welded this down yet there you go that's all that stuff that was in there more scrap [Music] there we go again looking at everything i didn't do hey [Music] so [Music] um [Music] okay uh here you can see hopefully you can see you can see how the drip rail has this nice goes down then it transitions to this gong show it's actually sticking out uh so essentially what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna cut this this has to get pushed in more and then this edge has to come down so i can correct what i didn't do yesterday um i might have to what i end up going to do is i'll have to do a slit underneath here and then i can pull this rail out just a bit to finish this all off i'll compare it to the other side well maybe not depends how this turns out but once i get that done then i can get that cut out and then i can do a new a new section off the top there a new filler panel [Music] i'm starting to get tired of welding i've been doing it for what feels like hours got a little bit of warpage happening up top but i'm not too worried because i can finish it out i have a hammer that i'll show i got a little bit of a dip here everything else feels pretty good though over here there's a little bit of a low spot too but i'll dolly those out i haven't even done this yet still gotta weld all that but i think i'm gonna change pace here i'm gonna pull out the grinder i'm gonna start making a big mess here i'm gonna grind all this up see how it looks well i got some of the grinding all done kind of roughed out uh my grinder of choice for dressing uh wells actually is like uh it's not even a flap disc it's just a a paper disc cuts like a beast and it lays it pretty flat to which is what i like there is some over on this side she got a little hot she's a little low i'm gonna just hammer dolly it out i might just grab my punishing hammer i have like an air powered punishing hammer i'll see how the hammer dolly works first that comes out the way i need it to then i'll uh i'll go with that [Music] all right monday night i'm gonna switch it up uh i'm gonna start dismantling that thing to fit this thing in there how far i get i don't know we'll see how ambitious they get [Music] so you can kind of see the mess there mess up here now this is just strictly an eyeball trying to see how how and where we are here this is not as terrible as i thought but yeah guys you have to cut a lot of this stuff out to clear the steering box that's kind of the norm and then of course you know clearance that for your control arms and stuff and we just keep setting it down until we pocket it into the frame then we can box it all up [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] cool well we're now camaro clip installed uh everything's there set the dress it and then i'll paint it and stuff but for now it'll do until i mock up the motor and stuff something going back and forth on this but i'm thinking i'm just going to go with the four bar for now i'm just going to tack the diff in there until i make some mounts uh to hold the diff in i'm just going to zap i'm gonna square the frame up and i'm gonna zap it in there [Music] okay i realized i didn't show you a lot of the fab work here but i have the upper bars are in uh the lower bars are tacked in i am going to get rid of some of this junk here i am going to put in some plating uh just to gusset that up [Music] [Music] do [Music] do i have my hooptie hoop is in there now so now my braces are in i still got to do uh um shock bronc which looks like it's going to work between these and we're going to make up some kind of a mount as you can see seems like a good day to try to fit an ls in this thing the plan here is i got an nv 3500 trans i have just the junker motor that i use for mocking up but at least i can try to get an idea where everything's going to fit i really doubt those are going to work so pretty much just going to slide everything in and see what i got to cut and whatnot to make everything fit [Music] all right as you can see motor's loosely mounted in there it's got to go back but i have transmission clearance issues inside as you can see the motor mounts are not gonna work so i'm gonna make something new there okay here's our uh some of our dilemma right now just got the training it's just sitting on this i mean it's still on the strap here but it's sitting on here so she's not quite centered or where she's supposed to be but i tried test fitting a drive shaft and it doesn't actually fit through the hoop here she's a little uh must have smaller shafts back then the uh u-joint all that stuff doesn't fit in there so i'm going to have to enlarge in this whole area so the plan will be just to blow this open for now and uh because i want to be able to remove the transmission i'm going to have to make somehow a removable subsection of this cross member [Music] [Music] do all right so these are the pieces that i cut out on the plasma table there um just got to bash them in place while i got to trim them up here a little bit there and clean everything up and then weld her in [Music] [Music] most of my motor mounts are in uh i'm just going to make a triangulated gusset on the top right here something there just for a little extra meat okay for some tabs are made just gonna clean it up burn them in okay well here's where we're at the motor mounts are welded in i gotta mark the holes to drill them yet the uh exhaust well she almost fits you can see it hits on this side and uh this side not so nice it's not terrible so i might cut the manifolds and clock them uh [Music] cut and welded them lots doing turbo stuff so it'll be fine and i gotta still cut off the old mounts they don't really interfere with anything but i do maybe wanna run ac on here so i'm gonna have to get rid of that thing there underneath you can see my my crude motor mount is in uh it's fine i still have to build an x-frame like uh underneath here i'm actually going to build a cross frame yet same on top just like a plate just to connect the two and still be able to pull the transmission out the motor mounts you can kind of see how they are i mean they're nothing fancy but they'll do what i need them to do okay i'm not too pumped about it but thinking i'm just going to start on the floor in here see how it goes [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do i still have some floor work to do but uh i think i was gonna hang my pedals and stuff right now see how that all works out i have a pedal assembly from an s10 that is going to be what i'm going to use um i have the booster and everything from it as well i kind of want to make sure i get this thing in place where i can still get my hood closed and everything else so that's my first plan of attack let's get that thing in [Music] hugely productive night but i kind of have my steering column where i think it looks good nothing's mounted like everything's like really loosey-goosey here yet but uh yeah i don't know things look okay okay so here's the plan a buddy did his firewall a while back so he left his template which is so darn close chevy pontiac i don't know they're pretty close just need to add a little bit to the middle there so uh i'm gonna widen that up i'm going to take a little off the bottom and i'm going to transfer it to some [Music] aluminum [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] so this is what i'm doing this is what i guess they call like a machine touring turning way i do it or the way i'm doing it here is i just cut out a piece of scuff pad so i took this chunk i lay it down i take my drill i just have a emery cloth whatever the heck the pad is on there it's just not square so it wobbles if i try doing it so if you do it on the scuff pad it at least doesn't walk on you so i kind of what you do is you start one row boom boom boom boom then come back and cut halfway in like halfway so you haven't half overlap so the next round i'll kind of so yeah it's pretty straightforward [Music] do [Music] as you can see my fender's here my tank hangs here and when i air the car out with a smaller tire my rear quarters actually hit the ground so that's going to be a bit of a problem and from behind because the bumper is not very big that looks really gross now it's a plastic tank so i'm kind of liking that in the sense that i can if i accidentally drag it on the ground there's like no sparks that's kind of nice this thing came out like a jeep like a yj or something like that i don't know somebody wrecked one here and it was lying around so it had an electric fuel pump so that's kind of a win i could switch out the pump so uh i kind of dig it it fits between the rails nice so i'm thinking i'm just going to cut out the last bit of floor that i got that's really nice and i will just raise the trunk floor to accommodate this it's a big trunk i don't need it all i guess i can put my fuel tank in some of that space maybe i'll put a spare tire slug on the one side i don't know but i guess uh i guess i'll just start hacking her up [Music] [Applause] [Music] do okeydoke well i got my red sort of zapped in well upper bolt holes are in i made a bracket up here i tied it into the bottom bottom of the rad's not tied in yet i have to figure out how to get these filler necks to match up i had bought some of these elbows on aliexpress just for something like this so i'm probably gonna somehow figure out how to scab this thing underneath the rad so i can have a simple hose and then i'll just weld this shut this upper hose should be okay close enough it'll work there to there just waiting for my compressor to charge up and then i'm uh cutting out my gauge cluster i kind of gutted the old one so i'm making a filler panel and i'll put all my gauges in there that way i can bolt it back into the original spot do that doesn't look too bad and now i gotta pretty much pull it out and strip the dash clean it all apart for now i'll just leave it in there but uh yeah i got a bunch of cleaning up to do and figure out how i'm gonna do this glove box i think that's uh that's about it for tonight i'm trying to do is because i have these lights but they don't have any guts uh but they look way better than the ones that are supposed to be on that car so i have lights like this with this really cool glass lens but doesn't fit in there it's like same size but with this being buggered anyways i'm thinking i'm going to take all this junk off and somehow put this housing inside of there and then i can put a halogen bulb in here this one's pretty crazy [Music] chop these babies down look at that stuff fancy so yeah i gotta take a couple inches out of that so i'll take you guys along for the ride while i do this okay wing windows first thing i gotta do here is get the glass out and then uh this is gonna have to go down because the way the new window comes it'll be like down to here so uh first things first let's get the glass out i think i'm gonna drill these because it's gonna move into a different profile somehow um i'm not sure how or this is i don't know we'll figure it out i want to try doing without cutting this although it might be easier but if i do the one way you might not notice it that i mucked with it i don't know there's many ways to do it and i guess we're going to find out as many ways i've done it regardless gotta get the glass out first so i'm gonna get to that if i put this in here like so she needs a bit of loving [Music] well basically this is done um you can see a little doodad there uh now i gotta what i'm gonna do is use the torch i'm going to heat this up i've done it in the vise before and just manually forced it but i find it kinks and the chrome isn't very good on here so i'm thinking i'm actually just going to paint this so either way i'm going to heat this up and slowly bend it to what i need it to do here [Music] looks good and that is and that still needs uh you got to make the brace up on top but yeah wing window and now i got to do this all over again for the other one but i'll save you that i'll just do it well it's gonna work on my window molding you can see there's a this is uh i need to take a little bit out of it so i think the straightest part is probably around where that screw hole is i'm going to cut just above that and try to get this sucker to fit back in there so that's not a terrible fit on this side i got to still run the zip through there it's a little tight but i uh left the welded yet but i'll wait till i do all this other one right now i've got a lot of cutting to do here as you can see the door shape has changed a lot [Music] all right here is the finished product i think it looks pretty good tonight i'm gonna tackle some of this dash i'm gonna pull this off try to straighten that out uh these are like light switches and stuff but they're kind of just a fixture permanent now so i'll figure something out there i do have a cover for this so this is not a big deal i have a new one of this and a cover but this glove box i don't and it's just pretty jank pretty jacked up here so i'm going to pull this apart try to straighten out that bracket so it actually functions i'll figure out some way to latch this and yeah let's start there see where we [Music] get [Music] so gone from trashed pretty crappy too nice so let's see how that fits if it's good then i'll take it out paint the inside or something figure that out there we go it uh fits pretty good uh the fitment on the bottom is not perfect but it doesn't rub so [Music] pretty good i'm happy with it opens does everything it's supposed to do i'll have to make some stops in there and probably put a magnet or i'm gonna do something just to hold that up uh yeah i'm pretty happy the way this all turned out [Music] all right you've seen a heck of a lot of screwing around going on i uh got everything all done as close as i was gonna be able to get underneath there so i just like to put a coat of glass on everything just because i did do some welding and whatnot i don't know if i'd say it seals it or does anything but uh i'll by first say i am no professional any of this i do whatever and it works so but anyways i do a bit of glass i'm gonna sand this down a little bit i'm not gonna take very much of it off because the idea is not to uh again i don't put any more than i need on there just to do my initial coat uh then i'll do actually do some mud at least that'll be the next step uh yeah i don't know what to say is what it is the trunk is not terrible so most of the the hacking that went on was actually all done right here whatever uh whatever happened whoever put the pickaxe to the trunk there there was that rust hole over there so we fixed that uh yeah i'm just gonna keep going at it [Music] and [Music] first layer of mud i know this looks crazy excessive and that's because uh i'm very wasteful with this stuff because i don't have patience to uh go nuts to do this like a million times so what i normally do is i put way too much on first time around and i pull out the old cheese grater and i pretty much saw most of it all off but uh makes life easier cause i do that i might actually use like a a lead file or a rasp whatever i have to clean that because i don't know who used it last i'll use that just to give it a finish and then i hit it with a sander but you know usually my goal is to try to hit it with two coats and then i'm done otherwise you're gonna sit there forever put a little on little off at least that's when i took auto body in school they always said you know put on a little bit and then you gotta sand then it's just blotchy mess and you always when you put some bondo on you sand it you end up buggering up everything around it so you end up the best to do is put everything and then if i have to put a little bit of bondo here you're best to put too much on everywhere so you have stuff to sand off everywhere i don't know i don't know i'm no professional actually i'm no professional at it i'm just telling you how i do it right or wrong that's pretty much what i do uh i'm sure there's better ways to do it but like i say bondo's cheap and instead of me pulling my hair out trying to do it all i figure i just do it this way whatever i don't know it is what it is [Music] these spots aren't terrible this is sanded with 40. i'll hit it with 80 and then when i prime i'll do some high build and then i sand that down uh but with just a single coat i uh well other than the glass the fiberglass the bondo i got like a little spot here and here there's you can see there's a little low spot but uh the rest of it doesn't feel terrible it's pretty good like the primer will fix the imperfections i find the less i touch it the straighter it'll be the more times i have to go over it i find i screw it up more so that's what i've learned anyways and that works for me that doesn't always work for everybody else out there i know that looked like excessive amount of bondo but like i say i i waste crazy amounts but i'm not sitting here for hours on end like it took longer for it to dry it's been 20 minutes from i think when i was had my last video when i maybe i muttered it i don't remember what i had going on there but uh yeah and like i've almost nailed out the trunk so [Music] do [Music] okay i don't know if you can see there was a crease up here but it's actually pretty much all gone it's still a little rough out there but i'm it's pretty good over here these don't feel too bad i'll run the the sander over at one time and then we'll see if we see brown depending how much brown we see feels pretty good for the most part i got here i got pretty good around here there's a low spot right here this patch didn't work out and it's behind the brace i'm gonna have to pry that out uh rest of this i'm gonna do a little bit up here this is low low so these aren't bad rest of the fender's pretty good it's just everything in the front we got one right there so i gotta do that one i gotta do a few here so i'll smoosh those out and then i'm gonna give everything a sand let's see how that looks [Music] there's still some imperfections but wow this is like other than here i'm going to stud pull it but it's not even a crazy dent so i'm gonna leave it out here you can see there's still like i'll have to clean this out before i mud it but there's like like nothing it's uh i don't know it's good enough um just a driver it's gonna get all stone shipped and banged up anyways so so that's good enough for me [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] it's all down with uh wax and silicone remover uh just to get any fingerprints and stuff off this was the stuff i used um it's just the habit of doing it's probably a good habit next is i'm going to tack it off with a tack rag and then mix up some primer [Music] everything's all sealed up uh just letting it flash a little more i'm just mixing up my paint right now uh so i'm gonna do first coat very shortly [Music] do [Music] do [Music] there the girl sits i splashed a little bit of paint on the rims borrowed rolly's uh spider caps for now i think it's a pretty killer combo i like the black rolly had a good idea so that's how we're going to finish up the grill here i think where this stuff where the chrome was just toast i just painted it but i think i'm going to paint the teeth on this side black just to match this i think i want to take some tan into the mix here so i might outline all the stripes with like a cream i want to do the same on the wheels so i'm probably going to stripe in here and around the rim or try to do an attempt at it see what happens so when i got my paint my tan i think i'm going to practice doing the rims i'm going to use this baby and a bit of this [Music] okay got the wheel all cleaned up i am trying this sucker out again so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] here's my rough design that i came up with i don't know a little odd but i think it'll be okay i think it'll be fine i think i'm just going to pleat the upper portion of this and uh i gave myself lots of extra so i'll be able to trim it after i'm going to pleat the upper part and i'll leave the bottom kind of plain [Music] do [Music] it's together i guess it's fancy i don't know i'm on the fence about it that is what it is it's done now see if i got enough to start figuring something that one on the back panels i'll probably start messing with that [Music] tonight [Music] this is uh what i came up with so i don't know it's something it's not perfect but it definitely looks better [Music] which is a little wrinkly we'll deal with it better than what it should be i did wrap the top i still have to wrap a little bit on the bottom of the windows there but ah so yeah i'll have to do some work on the wrinkles here see if we can get them sorted out and this little spot just tucks up the material in there yeah i don't know it's fancy good enough [Music] do [Music] do [Music] the little little modernist modernish trying to work some wrinkles out of them but yeah i'll sit on them that'll fix it so right now i'm just going to work on the weatherstripping on the door what i did is i don't know i was at a garage sale and somebody had a roll of this stuff for 10 bucks i think it's for window i don't know something to do with windows anyways but what i do is i put it in the car and i put a bit of urethane and i just glue it in the car and i make my weather stripping out of that so you could cut the bottom off or something but when you pack it in there you don't see it so me i don't know that's what i've used i have a lot of it so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] no [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] no no no no no no [Music] no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no you

Channel: Halfass Kustoms

Views: 1,372,948

Rating: 4.7412577 out of 5

Keywords: halfass customs, hot rod, 1938 pontiac, rat rod build, 1938 pontiac coupe, sheet metal work, 1938 pontiac business coupe, hot rod transformers, before after, car build timelaptse, ls swap, custom 4 bar, chop top, 1938 pontiac coupe transformation, 3wcoupe, 3w coupe, timelapse build, start to finish build, building a hotrod start to finish, custom interior, camaro clip, camaro subframe, halfass kustoms, rat rod build time lapse

Id: OkemZVeDdj8

Length: 63min 39sec (3819 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020