[Electronic M]

Since the seam wasn't really a tight seam like on a van but a 1.5" wide ~1/4" deep wavy bottomed dish in the body panel a few days ago I filled it with Bondo. I didn't remove much of the seam sealer maybe three 2" strips where there was obviously rust under it and ground down to metal a good way past the edge of the rust.... that showed me that aside from the bad spots I went after the metal was rust free under the old seam sealer....I considered patching the rust with new metal but I'd need a sheet metal brake or a new body panel to replace the largest spotty parts. There is a big hole on the edge of the passenger opera window that due to the curves is well beyond my tools and skills to recreate in metal.

My solution was to grind the metal till the orange of the rust was 98% gone and just black spots then hit it with locktite extend rust neutralizer to turn the spots completely black then Bondo over it...so far it has gone alright. I just need to get the surface a little smoother on both sides and resand the top of the roof and I can prime and paint it.

After some deliberation about deleting the roof chrome trim I've decided my years old impression of pictures cars ordered with factory vinyl roof delete is correct...It looks BAD without the roof trim. I now need to find new trim mount clips for it since a number of the originals had disintegrated and some of the remaining ones I destroyed grinding the rivets out so I could fix the rust beneath them...
I also decided not to under coat over the roof area....a test spray a did on the plastic back of a used up sheet of sand paper showed that the texture doesn't remain even after drying. I'm probably just gonna paint it Black matching the body color and leave it that way.
To reach these conclusions I painted one side black (I'm going to sand that off to finish smoothing the Bondo under it) and set all the trim back on.

One job in it's self was the rear window trim.... until I removed the vinyl I wasn't sure I even had a useable one... the vinyl covered it completely and asside from some glimpse of what I thought might have been it I had no way of knowing if was even present till I stripped the vinyl. The trim had tar adheasive tape sealing it's edges to the body and the roof was glued to it so it looked like hell when I dug it out....it took easily 2-3 hours of scrubbing it with paper towels soaked in goof off and scraping with fingernails to get that crap off of it. It wasn't bad underneath. The top sections had the same rainbow iradescent brass like plateing that speakers and chassis of some 70's Asian made audio amps have (it was mostly gone from the bottom) which I polished off down to normal looking stainless underneath. Most of the bottom clips for the rear window trim are orange dust so I'm going to either have to get more or redistribute the good ones to hold things good enough...