Yes, my thoughts exactly. Best practice here is to straighten the panel as much as possible with hammer and dolly, then apply the filler.RobMoore wrote:-snip-
If you have a dolly then lots of tapping should help remove most of it but my guess is you will need to use filla to get it true.
and since you have basically built this van from scratch I would imagine you wont be able to live with such a visible distortion.
If you have ever seen American Hot- Rod on Discovery channel- after prepping the metal work to get the panels as flat as possible they skim virtually the whole car with filler then sand it down. You could get a big tub of filler, say Upol- easy sand and skim the whole side once it is all in etch primer. Then sand with the longest block you have, 80 grit, then 180, finally 240 before filler primer. When you get to the 180 grit stage, then dust the panel with a mist coat of matt black paint and then sand with 180. This will reveal any low spots left as black paint that had not been sanded off the low areas. Fill again and sand etc till the whole panel is perfectly flat. Ripples gone. It is possible!