Metal Design: Car Restoration Tips

"Hi. I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods and we are going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Now, Alex is laying out patterns and making pieces of the things that were cut off the car. He tries to save any bits of steel that came off the car that are usable. So, it's easier to trace them and reproduce them than it is to invent them in the first place. Just years of experience gives him the idea of how to lay it out. It's just logical stuff. If you are doing this for the first time, it might be helpful to photograph each step so that you can remember how the car looked as you were cutting it apart. That's a good technique for going through something so you don't have to try to remember too much. As you saw when the car came apart, there was lots of body filler on it, but you don't want to be doing a lot of work where you have to be covering up your bad workmanship with a lot of body filler. It's best to reproduce the thing exactly as it was in steel. And you can use little or no body filler when you go to do your final work."