First thing we did was some planning of what needed to be done, what we wanted to do, and an inventory of what parts I have left over from my car. As far as appearance goes, I had the painter I work with at Speedtech Performance look it over and he thinks the factory copper color should buff out fairly nicely. With that in mind I went to work on a concept rendering. The car definitely needs some visual upgrades to get rid of the grandpa look. Black always does that pretty well but I don't want to go overboard and duplicate my car. Just the right amount should do the trick...
With it being copper and black and trying to achieve a tough guy look what better to call it than CopperTop. My son came up with the angry CopperTop dude so I just had to throw it in the rendering.
Eventually I would like to fix the door dings, get the body smooth and repaint it, but for now we'll go with a bit of the roughed up Street Fighter look. All the chrome is in surprisingly decent shape so we're going to use black PlastiDip so it's not permanent just yet. Later on we'll decide whether to powdercoat it or not. The lower stainless body trim is coming off and I'll have to grind down the rivets, so from the lower body line down will get semi gloss black paint. All other trim like the wheel openings and such will either be removed or painted black. Window frames, B and C pillars will go semi gloss black. The stripes will also be semi gloss black and will match the styling of mine. Eventually a cowl scoop will get put on and I have a spare set of single rib Salon grilles like the ones on my car that will replace the stock 3 bar wagon/442 grilles. The stock grilles are in great shape so they will be for sale on ebay soon. My son wants fender vents like mine, but I designed his to open vertically to be a little different. A ride height adjustment via some performance suspension parts and my old GTA wheels wrapped in 245-50-16s will finish the look off.