Roof Skin

[Canadianwraith]

Starting on body work soon on my 69 Camaro. I noticed that as I touch the roof it oilcans badly. The roof support is at least 3/4" away from the roof. How would some of you experts fixing this? I was planning on measuring in several places along the support and making shims to fit between the roof and brace. Someone mentioned to me that they had used expanding foam to go between then cut it flush with the brace when hard. This seems sketchy to me so I thought I'd get some better advice.
Thanks all.

[dhutton]

Hard shims will ghost for sure. 3M anti-flutter foam would probably be a good choice.

Don

[Canadianwraith]

Thanks Don, I will search for this

[Perry M]

When doing the body work on my 67 Camaro, we used seam sealer in that area. Later we noticed a low spot on the roof panel, probably caused by attaching the brace to the underside of the panel. We cut it loose but the low spot remained, Before paint, we had to repair the low spot, Be aware. Maybe use heat and cold to shrink the skin to get rid of the oil-canning.

[dhutton]

When doing the body work on my 67 Camaro, we used seam sealer in that area. Later we noticed a low spot on the roof panel, probably caused by attaching the brace to the underside of the panel. We cut it loose but the low spot remained, Before paint, we had to repair the low spot, Be aware. Maybe use heat and cold to shrink the skin to get rid of the oil-canning.
Seam sealer is too stiff for that application.

I was going to suggest working the skin to remove the oil can but that is not something for novices imho.

Don

[Canadianwraith]

I agree Don, I've never used a shrinking disc, can't see it ending well.

[thinkfastroth]

Might be less effort to just replace the roof skin, 3/4 of a inch to the braceing sounds like a lot but I could be wrong.

[dhutton]

Might be less effort to just replace the roof skin, 3/4 of a inch to the braceing sounds like a lot but I could be wrong.

Agreed assuming the brace is not bent. But if the roof looks “straight” then maybe it is ok for foaming the gap.

Don

[Jim Streib]

While I never had any "oil canning" issues I did years ago with stereo competitions, glue the topside of my middle left to right roof inner structure to the underside of the roof skin and never saw any distortion in the reflection of the paintwork in the roof.

The reason I glued mine was I was tired of seeing how the roof skin flexed up and down at SPL contests. The whole thing to get a higher SPL is to keep things from flexing and with the roof skin moving uncontrolled it reduced the overall SPL levels. Once I glued the parts together, the roof had a lot less flex in it. It still flexed but not near as much.

On another car of mine the inner roof structure had a buckle in it and I located the spot welds, drilled them out, took out the inner roof beam, straightened it, then added some structure, welded it back in then filled the gap with glue to tie the beam to the roof skin.

If someone says attaching the roof beams affects the skin and it's reflection in the finish paintwork then hopefully there are pictures of this issue.

The roof reflection on my one car after 10+ years of the inner roof structure being glued to the roof skin:

https://static1.pt-content.com/images/pt/2022/01/51129688688_36ec157013_z-1.jpg

Taking out the buckle in an inner roof beam and then adding structure to it:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51129688688_36ec157013_z.jpg

Jim

[dhutton]

Always great to see folks recommending against established standard practice based on one anecdotal personal experience that isn’t even the same situation …. :)

Don

[Jim Streib]

Yep it sure is.

Jim