So it made a lot of sense to take the whole thing on down to the bare metal. One of the guys working on Zak’s Cuda recommended an environmentally sane aircraft paint remover and it worked great, taking off grease, grime and paint in minutes… without getting us high on the fumes. Once the paint was gone, some previous minor bodywork was revealed, but since the Cuda was now going to be used for road racing and some street driving they pulled the air conditioner, heater and hoses to fill in the holes left in the firewall.
Getting down this far to bare metal has its own rewards in really knowing where any previous body repair and hidden rust might be found. There was a little acid that had leaked from an earlier battery, but there really wasn’t much rust in the uni-body front end. Now that Zak and his crew had gone this far, he thought hard about taking his resto the extra mile to take off the rest of the body spackle, undercoating, road grime, oil and grease from underneath the Cuda.
Since the new and improved Cuda was intended for California road courses, the original filler neck was filled and relocated to the top of the fender for quick refueling.