Hooray for Bondo!
By noderel:
First off, Bondo is/was a trade name, but it has come to mean any of the dozens of catalyzed metal fillers so common to modern body/fender repairs. It is magic, although for too many of the unwashed civilians out there, it will not make a total wreck look new again. Although, let me tell you of an incident many years ago in the San Fernando Valley. I am reminded of this because Gene Winfield was here in Australia recently, doing one of his great metal shaping workshops.
I routinely made the rounds of custom shops and speed emporiums during my years at Hot Rod Magazine, and then all those following years of freelancing to magazines. After Winfield had relocated from Modesto in central California to the San Fernando Valley in order to better serve the movie/tv industry, I included his shop as a regular stop.
On one particular visit, I found Gene on one side of a vehicle, a helper the other side, and a third person atop a step ladder pouring from a ten gallon bucket…bondo. Quick as the bucket was emptied, Gene and his helper would use a wooden lathe to screen the plastic into a semblance of a shape. All very fast, of course.
Incredulous, I watched a couple of these gargantuan applications of plastic filler. Then, during a break in the proceedings, Gene turned to me and said just one word “Movie”. Meaning he was making a movie car. A quick and not so clean reshape of a car for the cameras. It worked, but only as an image. It was most definitely not a road worthy vehicle, nor was it remotely intended to be.
One year, oh back about the early 1980’s, I was taking a break in the stands of the Oakland Roadster Show, shooting the breeze with Barris and Joe Wilhelm, if memory serves. We surveyed the floor covered in some truly magnificent examples of hot rod and custom car art, when Joe muttered a profound statement, “If we had only had Bondo back when!”
His words were eerily prophetic.
I grew up in a body/fender shop, breathing lead dust and lacquer fumes. I learned how to apply and shape bodylead by the time I was 10 years old. I knew how to apply stripes and polish with stove black before I was able to shave. I could stretch metal and shrink a hood, I could weld a door panel without distortion with an aircraft torch, I could spot blend lacquer paint as well as any grownup by the age of 15. I had never heard of plastic filler.
But, we didn’t bend and shape metal the way young people can now. We didn’t know what English wheels were, or MIG/TIG welders. We were in the dark ages of fabrication. When I think of what we could have achieved given the tools of today. Indeed, if we had known about Bondo.
No matter how hard we tried, we could never get the paint finish that is common now. We could never get quarter panels so straight, hood lines so precise, panel gaps so precise. Today, all this is taken for granted. But, as the sign in the speed shop said, “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?”
I only use plastic filler as a very thin skim coat, not as a filler at all. Especially at the edge of a panel. If necessary, I get out the lead for an edge, because the filler is too fragile.
It isn’t that we couldn’t or did not metal finish as well as today, we simply did not have the means to achieve a perfect surface. Today, after a metal panel is finished, a flash coat of plastic filler is applied. This allows sanding to a flawless surface that will reflect the metal work to its very best appearance. Yes, had we had Bondo (and MIG and TIG and two part paint, etc) back then, what we could have achieved.