February 11, 2026

GAP Industries Reconstructs the Body of the Goodguys Grand Prize Giveaway 1966 Chevelle – Part 2

“There’s no such thing as a car that’s too far gone.”

That was one of the key takeaways from a conversation with Tim Palazzolo at GAP Industries when we were discussing this month’s installment of the 2027 Goodguys Grand Prize Giveaway ’66 Chevelle build. Indeed, as you’ll see in the photos on the following pages, nearly every piece of sheet metal on the Chevelle body was replaced with new reproduction steel from AMD – Auto Metal Direct. That was partially by design.

As an experienced car builder, Tim tells us he’s been burned many times by “nicer” project cars that end up being much rougher than expected once you strip them down to bare metal. So, when he went looking for this Chevelle, he intentionally sought a rougher, honest, less expensive starting point knowing that high-quality reproduction metal was available. “We’d rather buy a cheaper car knowing we’d need to do the work to it,” Tim says. “There was nothing hidden on this one.”

As we revealed in last month’s introduction to the project, there was little left of the original car after media blasting and removing rusty panels. What remained was basically just a roof and floor structure, and even that metal was questionable. Fortunately, the team at GAP Industries thrives on performing high-quality metalwork, which made this Chevelle the perfect demonstration vehicle for the shop’s abilities.

The team was without a new frame for the car when first diving into the metalwork, which helped guide the process. Using data from CAD modeling of a Chevelle, they built a dedicated frame table for the car with fixtures to coincide with factory body mounts. Then, they started with a fresh foundation for the body – a new one-piece AMD floor and rocker panels. The rockers were welded to the floor, and the assembly was mounted to the frame table.

From there, the Chevelle body was skinned of more damaged steel, including the rusty floor and the driver’s side cowl and door jamb, which were also wrinkled and rusty. The GAP crew then transferred the shell onto the new floor-and-rocker platform and began welding everything together. They were even able to reconstruct the door jamb and cowl using reproduction pieces.

Once the body structure was secured and squared to the new floor and frame table, the last bit of skinning could be done. The old roof skin was cut away to make way for a new AMD piece. The new roof skin was then temporarily fit in place, along with the quarter panels, taillight panel, trunk floor, and doors. The team would ultimately weld the roof skin and rear quarters together into one piece before attaching it all to the body shell. This allowed them to eliminate and smooth the original leaded seams where the roof meets the rear sail panels. It also allowed them to eliminate and smooth the drip rails while they had access to both sides of the roof skin for finishing the welds and fine tuning the metalwork. They also applied epoxy primer to the back and underside of all panels to prevent future corrosion.

The accompanying photos on these pages are not really a step-by-step how-to on the sheet metal work, but rather an overview to give you a sense of all that was done. It’s always fascinating to see how an experienced shop works through such significant sheet metal surgery. And if we’ve learned anything from watching the team at GAP, it’s that re-skinning a Chevelle looks relatively simple when left to the experts. If you missed Part 1 with the introduction of the Chevelle – check it out here!