1975 Pontiac Grandville Convertible

We're going to do some bodywork, add some customer requested extras and give this awesome ragtop a new coat of paint.

It's gonna be great!

July, 2020

Just dropped off by the owner. She is a 1975 Pontiac Grandville convertible.

I've never seen or even heard of these before, definitely a larger luxurious car. Extremely loaded, power windows and locks, AC, power seats etc.

Overall it appears to be in really good shape. We'll be doing some minor bodywork, paint and adding a passenger outside rear view mirror.

As always it looks so nice, but it's got to be taken apart to get rid of the ugly.

A real 70's color and name!

Color code 51, Sunstorm Yellow baby!

Originally a white top, customer has changed it to a black top.

There is some damage to the passenger fender and fiberglass headlight assembly. The owner has many replacement parts from a donor car. The front end comes apart pretty quickly.

Moving to the rear I strip it down to the bare bones.

Starting a pile of parts! They'll go back on once everything is pretty and looking new.

The seats and carpet have already been removed by the owner. I need to remove the door panels to gain access to the interior of the doors and quarter panels.

Not a good find, both doors have huge mouse nests in the rear lower corners. Very strong odor of urine and it's seeped down into the seam between the door skin and the door frame. Once the nest is cleaned out I'll need to neutralize this before painting.

We removed all the trim and outside mirror. Everything is carefully tagged and safely stored in large bins.

We are painting the door jambs and openings also, so everything needs to be removed from both sides.

The door latch strikers were left on for now, they will be removed when it's time to prepare for paint.

One of the few modifications the owner wants is a passenger outside rear view mirror. After carefully measuring the drivers side from several angles I determined where to drill the mounting holes for the donor mirror.

This ugly rust showed up under the wide lower trim on the drivers side. I assumed we'd find some on the car.

I marked out the area of rust and gave a wide margin to get into good solid metal.

Behind is some rusty, messy stuff!

I'm going to have to deal with this as well.

The car has beautiful fender skirts on the rear wheels.

This is the forward alignment bracket for the drivers side.

It will need to be cut out, getting it back in the correct spot is critical.

We'll address this and move forward next.