In this post, we will show and demenstrate the process taken to complete our 1963 Corvette Cleaning The Underside task.

We stripped and cleaned the underside of the Corvette body.  It’s looking great and we even found something that is not mentioned in the judging manual.

We connected the lifting frame on the Corvette and picked it up off the dollies so we could clean the underside.

When we were cleaning the underside, we came across these hand written numbers, 153.  The location of these numbers is in the cavity where the fuel tank mounts.  I think they would be very hard to see with the chassis and the fuel tank installed which is why we never noticed them before.  We took pictures and also took a tracing of them before cleaning the area so we can put them back on later.  The Numbers are a “Job Number” for the Corvette.  These were written on different parts of the car (doors, engine, firewall) to make sure all the parts went to the right car.

Here they are after a little scrubbing.

We needed to clean all the underside to bare fiberglass so we could get the “from the factory” look.

This is inside the wheel well with old undercoating, paint, and road grime built up over the years.  We used some chemical stripper to remove.

Here is the wheel well after cleaning.

The under side of the body after cleaning.

More of the underside after cleaning.

All of the fiberglass cleaned up really well except for a few spots around the exhaust that have burn marks. We tried to clean these up as much as possible as we can’t repair them because the fiberglass must be left bare.