1958 Cadillac Eldorado Bairitz

[HotWheels]

I can understand how you have 3-4 thousand hours into this so far...beautiful metal work.

I don't know how many of these 58's are out there, but it seems this will become one of the nicest in existence!

[foxhole]

I repaired all the floor braces and bolted them to the frame using little jigs i made to hold each mount bolted in the center of its adjustment. The next step was to attatch the new inner rocker sections to the crossmembers to tie them all together. I then cartridged the seville firewall to it and hung the front end and doors and center and rear tub, with the quarters and the trunklid all just to prove it was in the correct spot. I welded the cowl and braced it. That let me line up the outer rockers.

[foxhole]

Then I tore it all apart again to finalize my welds and get all the extra stuff out of the way. Did some repairs to the firewall. Stuff like that. hopefully i get most of my pictures in the correct order. i am posting this all from backup files from all the different photo sources. unfortunatly some of the pictures got lost so if you notice something jumping around in the timeline it is because i got it in the wrong order.

[foxhole]

Any of you who have been this far into a 57-8 caddy may be confused by the outer rockers. origionally they would have been thinner guage and stopped near the rear of the door where the quarter starts. I made mine run full length for a few reasons as well as going much heavier on the material.

I wanted to create a stronger box section to help the car twist less as the x frame convertables can flex and bump the top of the quarter into the rear edge of the door. It will in effect act as a strong back to stiffen the chassis as well as offering more safety if hit in the side (heaven forbid) and provide the bottom of the quarter which is missing anyhow. As you can see i added some drain holes to let water from washing drain as otherwise it would stay in the quarter.

[cobravii]

Amazing workmanship!! I am learning a lot from you!!

[foxhole]

Thank you all for your kind words. It is a nice feeling when others can aprieciate the hurdles than need be overcome in each aspect of the restoration. So often there is so little time looking back at what has already been done as we focus on what is still left to do. Especially when the car leaves and gets shipped away everytime it's finally done. Although i must say when the last screw gets tightened an test and tune is done and all the bugs are worked out I have sometimes stared for hours in awe and reflect on the last few thousand hours, untill the customer comes to take my car away. If i had the money i would buy back every car i have built for my own personal collection. It sure would be some collection and to be able to say i built them myself would be pretty neat. Enough day dreaming back to the build.

[foxhole]

Next to repair is the bairitz center section which has the rear wheel houses, trunk hinges, body mounts, convertable top mounts and rear seat back. This section was a little rough around the edges having lace like metal reminants in many areas that ajoin it to the other panels.

[foxhole]

The lip that mates with the part of the rear section that steps up at the front of the trunk was thin and full of holes so we repaier it and the rotted part under the body mount. when splicing parts from two cars togethet i like to use all factory seems as opposed to butt splicing as it keeps you with some reference points.

[foxhole]

The mounts that were cut off were next. The one side was repairable while the other side had to be fabbed from scratch. I made them in a simular manner to the last set of mounts I posted earlier in the thread

[foxhole]

on the inside of the car there are braces right above the mounts i just made that further support them as it is a high stress area of the body. I beefed up these aswell. I could have rolled the step in with a bead roller but chose to take advantage of the shape and used some 1/4 inch plate. This also let me use those mounts once welded in as a strong point for bracing and jigging.

[foxhole]

Fixed a thin spot around where the convertable top drains come out.

[foxhole]

I fixed a few other spots around the edges and lined it up on the frame and jigged it up in place.

[foxhole]

With the center section the right way up I repaired the drivers side where it connects to the rear tub.

[foxhole]

The passanger side had a hole that corrasponded with a hole in the quarter panel that looked like a bullet hole, makes you wonder about what colorful character may have owned the car or what it's history might be. I let Jake my sheet metal apprentice at the time do the passanger side. he watched me do the first one and then i hovered over him while he formed the panel and fit it. We did it one evening after work because he wanted to learn and while i may have taken the hammer from him a few times to help correct the shape: I think he did an exceptional job considering he had only done flat metal work and was learning the beadroller and all its abillities. Jake was stoked.

[Guest shorttimer]

Really impressive craftsmanship. Thank you for starting this thread.

[foxhole]

looking back at the blasted pics you can see the seperation point where we repaired bairitz and where there is just too little to repair. Also here is a few shots of the seville rear inner structure that while not perfect offers much more to work with.

[foxhole]

Once the bodymount brace was drilled out of the tub on the one side we found the rust that we knew would be there. I cut a happy little peice of sheet metal and bent it in the brake and rolled it to shape with the shrinker stretcher.

[foxhole]

The second part of the shape requiered was the dished in part that meets up with the happy little bettom we made. I popped a hole in the next patch and selected a chunk of scrap pipe that cradled the old piece nicely and used the big penis dolly to drive it home and flair the edge down into the pipe to create the desiered cup shape of the body mount. Then i rolled the rib into it that got removed when trimming the bad unhappy metal away.

[foxhole]

Then I welded it all in and ground off all the extra.

[foxhole]

there were other little repairs and odds and sodds that we fixed and replaced and even a few seams we opened up for further blasting and chemical treatment

[foxhole]

we drilled the rear panel off to repair the tapped cage plates and made some new heavy duty ones.

[foxhole]

With all the repairs and reblasting of edges and seams done we fit it to the car and jigged it to the frame and burned on all the plug welds.

[Roger Zimmermann]

When I began to repair my '56 Biarritz, I had the impression only a fool can reconstruct a car. However, this '58 car is worse than mine; after all I'm not so a fool!

Anyway, congratulation at the work you are doing. You know your job and, fortunately, young people are teatched in your shop.

[foxhole]

When I began to repair my '56 Biarritz, I had the impression only a fool can reconstruct a car. However, this '58 car is worse than mine; after all I'm not so a fool!

Anyway, congratulation at the work you are doing. You know your job and, fortunately, young people are teatched in your shop.

Thank you for the compliment Roger, I spent the last few hours reading the build thread for your lincoln and i must say even the most challanging day on a car like this seems to pale in compairison to the challanges you overcome daily on the lincoln. Simply amazing work. I feel honoured you aproove of my work.

[Roger Zimmermann]

You are welcome! Thank you too for your comments about the model I'm doing. I have certainly advantages over you: no time pressure, except that I should finish the model before I'm unable to continue and the costs are rather low. Time at disposal is the most precious element; fortunately, I have almost enough!

[foxhole]

I used the spare tire well from the Seville as the Bairitz one was more galvanized roof flashing than Cadillac. The Bairitz did however donate some of the upper rear section of its well to become the bottom of the new well. Obviously it is missing the indentation where the drain plugs mount.

[foxhole]

To form the indentation I made a quick buck from flat bar and plug welded a piece of sheet metal to it. Sorry for the poor quality pictures i must have taken them with my phone. I did manage to finally get a spell check program to start working so there should be less hard to read posts but I can't guarantee the right letters will get capitalized although I do try to at least hit the "I"s

[foxhole]

I hit it with a hammer a bit and waved a torch around to make the extra metal flow together. I'm not sure if I just stretched it over or fused and hammer welded it but it worked. Then I trimmed off the excess.

[foxhole]

When I plug welded the sheet metal to the buck I layed it out so the plug welds were dead center in the drain plug holes that needed to be cut. I center punched the plug welds and used a small annular cutter with a spring center to cut it free and well then I had the piece I needed.

[foxhole]

I welded it to the well and sand blasted my welds. I always sandblast my welds and then go over and re weld and spots where there is any porosity. Some areas just give you grief some times and you have to hit it three times but usually welding a touch on the hotter side helps to burn them out. We weld hot anyways to make sure we get good enough penetration to be able to grind both both sides smooth. I hate seeing gaps on the back side of a weld. It is a crack or rust bloom waiting to happen. After we re welded and re sandblasted; we welded the spare tire well into the rear tub. We also switched to using "We" instead of "I" when we type so we don't have to go back and find all the "i" and capitalize them.

[Roger Zimmermann]

When I restored my '56 Biarritz, I had also to fabricate some body parts. As you mention in your comments about my scale model, it's more difficult to work on something small than a large piece. However, the technique I used on scale models can be useful on real cars.

For example, to do the part you described, I would have done about the same as you, with one exception: all cold working! Steel is very forgiving, especially with a small flange like you had to do.

The ultimate would be to stamp the form directly form the wheel well by doing the male form and a femeale one, then pressing the male form into the femeale one. No welding, no metal cleaning, almost factory like! The sole difficulty is to aligh perfectly both tools. As the well is in between, it's not easy but it could be done, especially when a hole must be done. The hole could be used for a guide for both tools.

My method has a big inconvenient: it's time consuming and, as you are not doing that repair for your pleasure, time is a big factor.

Anyway, I really enjoy to see what your are doing on that '58 car!

[foxhole]

We have done several items in the male female die style. It is definitely the best. We usually use aluminum for the dies because it machines quickly and you can even use the wood router in some applications for trimming the aluminum and to radius the edges. Long steel downs in the corners help to keep it aligned. We also make wooden bucks quite often for shaping parts. In this case steel because I wanted to add heat just to make it go quicker and so I could fuse the extra metal where it bunches up to retain thickness. I was working at it cold but soon realized I would have to work it much more and could have a thin edge. When I have to make a piece I try to break down the shape in my head and then figure out the order of operations in my head for bends, shrinking, streaching, bead rolling, making dies, making bucks both steel, aluminum and wood and then try to make the call as how to make the best product in the shortest amount of time. I do wish sometimes that I could take some processes one step further but I try to be conscience of the money others are spending. Often I will only charge for the first 8 hours of the day and work twelve or fourteen in order to do something the way I want if the customer wants a corner cut. Often it becomes between me and the car, the customer sometimes is a third party and I try to do what is best for the car. I am lucky the Cadillac owner has expressed good taste and judgement. I still have many many hours in research, parts organization, and work that I don't bill for. Often when something runs way over I start to charge fewer hours while working more and dis punt the shop rate. I would rather see the car done and people enjoying it than sitting almost done.

[foxhole]

some mediocre pictures of unexciting quarter panel repairs

[foxhole]

its too bad we couldn't find more pictures of the trunk lid build because it was one of the major hurdles of the build. When i stripped the Bairitz lid it turned out the mint looking lid had been carved mostly from bondo. Some one spent a lot of time sanding and shaping the lip to make it look real but it was fiberglass mat and bondo. The bottom rear four inches of the trunk lid were all makebelive.

A Seville trunk lid is about four and a half inches longer than a Bairitz lid. The area where the hinges bolt on are totally different. The bulk of the lid is the same though. I sliced a bunch off the lid and opened the sides up where it wrapped over the inner frame. We cut and removed the part of the frame that was different and spliced in the original Bairitz part where the hinges bolt on. We left the outer skin long and trimmed it parallel to the inner frame once the inner was well tacked. Then I dollied the outer skin to shape around the new rear inner structure. In the end we were left with a shortened Seville lid with the proper Bairitz inner structure spliced in and a onepiece origional intact outer skin. It was a lot of layout but it payed off in the end. It was finnished well enough that it only needed some highbuild primer on the inside. I was really happy with it, it turned out really slick.

[foxhole]

I think these we supposed to be in there somewhere. Quarter mockup.

[foxhole]

The Bairitz tail panel was nothing more than a sculpture in bondo entitled Bairitz tail panel. We elected to presure wash and sandblast the Seville tailpanel and some of the related inner structure.

[foxhole]

We fit the tail panel prior to making any repairs to the complex inner structure.

[foxhole]

There is much more structure inside the tail panel of an Eldorado than one would think. Unfortunately i don't have many pictures but you can get the idea. We built a brace inside to keep the inner structure of the quarter panels from flexing inward or outward.

[foxhole]

Tail panel mounted in place and commencement of channel repairs.

[foxhole]

We pulled the car out and did a little blasting on all the welds we had done so far so we could reprime them. I set jake up in a tarp on the pad for the day.