Back to......VANagains NEWest 65 Chevy SportVan Deluxe

It's been a looong time since I posted here! Wow, not since April!?! Well, there has been progress, though it doesn't always look like it in the photos. I was going to skip it but in the end I paid them extra to straighten out the roof. Everything else was looking so good, I had to.

The guy doing most of the work on my van, Mr. Van, managed to get all the doors lined up! And after all of our discussion about how to deal with the cargo door gaps, Mr. Van just did it the old fashioned way: He put his rubber sanding block in the door jam and closed the door against it to bend things back the way they were supposed to be! (My dad used to use 2x4's.) It puts the exact opposite force on the hinges that they've gotten over all these years (slamming open). Whatever needed to bend, bent. My guess it was mostly in the door post where the hinge bolts on. This photo shows the back doors almost done. He later got the right door moved a bit more to the left. (Rebuilding all the hinges had to help with the alignment as well.)



Of course, all the doors have since been removed again for painting. They didn't mark the hinges, though, as I've heard other shops do. They left the hinges on the doors so they'll only have to line up the other half when they go back on.

They thought they had done the final primer paint but then the owner worked over all the bodyworked areas and made them better, then it got primed again.



And I know we're getting close now because they started on the interior! They did a quick cleanup of the surface rust inside the van, like the ceiling where it never got painted, and hit it with rust converter, then primed all that. They even got to all the extra pieces:



Next I'll show you how the dash is coming along! And the biggest decision of them all... the color!!!!

Wow...looks great. Glad to here your doors are now lined up. I remember that discussion from a while back.

The nose looks so nice! I hate going out to the shop and seeing the door dent. I am dreading trying to pull and straighten it and how much filler it is going to take to fill it.

Quick question on your interior you mentioned. You have the moulded pieces for around the inside? Are they going to paint those? I talked to the guy who is going to recover my seats and he said he would love to try covering them with vinyl. He said he would trade me the work for some polished panels for a couple of 68 Broncos he is restoring so I think I will give it a shot.

Your back flip out windows... Were the frames around them in good shape or are they replacing them? If replacing, any idea with what? Mine are bad and looking for a replacement source.

Looks great man! I am sure you are getting excited, just like I am!

Hey Matthew,

Yes, I've got all the plastic interior window trim you mentioned. Looks like it was painted a second time and some of it is peeling off. I was told this sort of thing should be dyed instead of painted. Interesting idea about covering it in vinyl, as long as they could do it without it getting wrinkles in it from all the curves. I like the original look of the plastic as long as the paint isn't coming off. I'll decide how to handle this trim when I get to the interior. See if the upholsterers have any tricks for cleaning up the stuff.

Yeah, those popout window frames are notorious for rusting out. Mine are in pretty good shape plus I grab two more from a San Diego junkyard here. Mostly just surface rust but couple areas are getting flaky. I would love to come up with a good solution for rebuilding these. Don actually adapted one from a newer van whose glass was actually larger than ours. He cut out a section of the frames in the middle where they're straight, then welded them back together.

I've been having trouble getting the hinges freed up on mine. They are frozen solid. Didn't notice when they were on the van. Turns out the metal was just flexing when I opened them! I could heat them up with the torch probably but I'd rather not disassemble the frames just to get hinges cleaned up. Any ideas?

Then there's the latches. The chrome is pretty rusty and they don't really hold the windows open very well. Defective spring or something? I am toying with the idea of making the pop outs electric! I grabbed a couple of mechanisms out of new or minivans in the junkyard to try out. Stay tuned…

Shucks,that looks great in primer.I got a suspicion we're gonna see one nice vanin some color soon.

Vanagain, this might help you out. I had a roller chain that was rusted solid and was $500 to replace. I went to home depot and bought zep calicium lime rust remover(basiclly there cheap version of clr) in gallon jugs for $10 a gallon. I put the chain in a bucket and covered with the clr and let it set. The stuff just eats the rust away. It took a few weeks but the chain is all free now Bob

Ive had and hear a lot of success with Evaporust. If you could get it to soak in a bath of that, it would be rust free in a matter of hours. Plus is non toxic/harsh, so it's simple to work with. Most of the auto parts stores have it, or you could get a big thing of it at Harbor Freight.

try a 50/50 mix of acetone & trans fluid- works on all rusted hinges & stuck pistons & rings .

soak in molasses for the hippy earth loving version of rust removal.

I've tried the evapo rust and believe it is clr , smells about the same just more expensive. I've also tries the molasses and water,with not much luck. The zep clr works i left a pair of visescripts in the bucket for a month(forgot them) and came back the chrome was gone they are black now Bob

Anyone who knows me well will not be surprised to hear that choosing the color to paint my van has been an agonizing process! You might think that my years as an artist would help, but no. I went through a long, expensive process when choosing the color of red for our house. And, come on, the van is way more important than the house!

I saw this van for sale in Florida a long time ago and knew this was the color scheme I wanted:



When I took my van out of the first body shop, they had a lot of it sanded down to bare metal, so I had to put some paint on it while I searched for a better body shop. So I took the opportunity to test out a color. I had a local auto body supply store mix up the Chevrolet "Turquoise Poly" 510 that my van came with. But when I sprayed it on, it looked too silvery and green.



I was thrilled to see my current body shop had so many shades to choose from! They have a BASF paint mixing machine and its Color-Max paint matching system consists of hundreds of chips that are the actual paint sprayed on a 2"x4" cards. I was thrilled until it came time to pick one!

I looked through these blues and found those with the most green since I was going for turquoise. I chose the second and third from the left book and then a much lighter one, the second in the right book. They looked like nice, bright but retro colors, looking at them straight-on in the sun:



But after seeing the colors sprayed on a test door, I started learning about a thing called flop! With today's metallic paint, you need to look at the color's "side tone". A lot of them change dramatically in hue, chroma (saturation), and value when seen from the side. This can be due to a lot of things like the size of the metal flakes, if it has any pearl, etc. So look at the same color chips from the side. They get a lot darker:



So here's what I was seeing:





This can make a paint job look really cool, emphasize the contours, etc. In fact, this explained the contrast I was seeing in this Corvan photo. Looks cool but wasn't quite what I was after:



(I need to point out that these colors look totally different in photographs! They go bluer and get more contrasty.)

After these three paint tests I was asking them if they could make it a little greener, less flop, finer metal flakes, etc. (really testing their patience). There are so many variables! They said it would be best if I could find a chip I liked, or find a car with a fatory color, so they could have an exact formlua. Well, there aren't many turquoise cars these days! I did come across a 2012 Honda that looked very nice, not exactly retro, but I had them try it.



I loved how the car looked (and, again, the photo doesn't really capture it) but two different BASF recipes for that car didn't look right. Too blue and dark for me.

I should point out that each go around with a new color costs me for paint and an hour of their time! This was getting very stressful for me and for them, I'd say! I kept asking for their advice on this but they really wanted a formula, not just descriptions from me.

Fortunately I had dragged my roommate into this whole decision process and she had grabbed a couple of the green books. I thought those would all be too green but she found two candidates, one light, one deeper. So I had them try those two out. Here's one of the Honda colors along with the two greens:



The one on the right is their Honda color! I tell ya, it is really tricky with these metallics. It literally depends on how you look at it! Here are all the color tests:



But I have a color I'm happy with! The solution was to not look at them all together. Each color affects your impresson of the one next to it. I took these test doors home and covered up all the other tests and looked at them one by one. And here is the winner! It was the lighter of those final greens:



The photos do show how it changes in different angles, times of day, in sun and shade. I've been looking out at it in the driveway throughout the weekend and I'm loving it! What a relief! Monday I tell them to go ahead and start painting the van!!

Thanks Don!! That new glass is going to be real nice!

Well, this week paint was actually been sprayed on my van! They did the jambs and insides of all six doors. Looks great and feels so smooth!!







This color is very tricky to photograph! I'd say the bottom one is most accurate.

Ya did great on color choice.

Love that color!!!! Going to look very nice!!!

That's going to look awsome Vanagain. Great looking color.

TRUE!!-SOOOOOOOOO TRUE!!

I got a big surprise today! I called the bodyshop this morning to say I wanted them to be done with my van before the holidays so I can work on putting it back together over my Christmas break. Turned out they'd been making progress in the last couple weeks. He told me he'd sprayed the door jams. And the dash and doghouse. Oh, and the roof! When I got there at lunchtime today I saw he had also painted the whole outside! The doors had been put back on and fitted. He said he'll hit the whole outside again, not just the doors, so it all matches.







They've got a couple runs to sand out on the dash.


Look at that sweet roof!! Now nice and straight! New seam sealer in the drip rail too.


They also pulled the steering wheel and steering column so that can all be painted. The wheel will be two-tone, of course, and the column, heater box, parking brake, and brake pedal will be the stock dark gray. And he suggested we send the belly pan and wings out to be powder coated with a hammertone gray so they'll be good and tough.

I brought them a bunch of the small hardware for the doors that I'd taken home, cleaned up, and painted.

It's coming together!! Gonna end this year on a good note!

its going to be sweet!!! send more pictures as you go with the build

Vans =looking Great!! Tell the painter - painting is just like baseball=NO Drips,No Runs & no Errors!!!

Checked in with my bodyshop today. All of the turquoise has been painted and now they're masking off for the white!!

It won't be long now Rich! Congrats, it's all coming together. Keep the photos coming.

love it.............