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I have named her Dorothy

In late December 2005 my friend Tom Nahodil and I traveled from Cleveland, Ohio to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to purchase a 1963 Galaxie XL 500 convertible. I bought the car from Mark Hinds. Mark performs as a Kenny Rogers double in a tribute show.

What makes this car special to me is the color and that in 1966 I learned to drive in a car identical to this one.The color is called Ming Green which is a dark metallic turquoise.

I have named her Dorothy after my Mom who was the owner of the car I learned in. Pretty cool car for a Mom! My Mom said it looks the same but hers was smaller.

I parked her in the garage with my white 1963 Galaxie, my black 1980 V-8 MGB and my wifes 2002 white T-bird.

Disassembly

I started taking it apart almost immediately. My original plan was to re-do the interior and touch up the marks on the body. I could see a few nicks and one area of rust. I also planned on detailing the engine compartment.

I found a mess under the carpet. Roofing tar and sheet metal covered the passengers floor. What a mess! The original metal was pitted pretty bad but it was also very solid. The padded dash was badly cracked and the carpet was shot. The seats had been recently recovered but the were in need of new foam. All of the interior panels were in very good shape.

Cleaning up the bottom

We removed the engine and I moved the car to Mike Kichka at Finishing Edge for the body work and bottom clean up. Mike is located in Twinsburg, Ohio. Mike had given me some ideas for the steps we should take and he allowed me to work on the car. They had a fixture to tilt the car up on its side for the bottom clean up. I spent quite a few hours over there scraping and cleaning. It very quickly became evident this was not going to be easy or quick.

We decided to remove the fenders to get the front inner fenders out for blasting.

Separation

After endless hours of scraping on the bottom we decided to separate the body and frame. There are only sixteen or so bolts holding the body on the frame. Mike had a rotisserie for the body.

This appealed to me because I could now to take the chassis back to my shop and Mike could work on the body.

We are now about six months into the project.

Chassis

I now moved the chassis back to my shop. My friend Joe Bacik and I started to completely disassemble it to get it ready for sandblasting.

Frame after blasting

We took the frame, the inner fenders and all the suspension parts to have them sandblasted. All these parts went back to Finishing Edge for metal etching and painting. We then brought the frame back to my shop to start the reassembly process. As bad as the frame looked it really cleaned up nice.