9/15/02
Once stripped, the restoration has begun in earnest. I'll be detailing what I
do from here on out.
Here are the cars that I had to start with:
The blue one has swivel seats and most of the accessories that I want,
but is so rusted underneath that it isn't viable as a restoration project.
The green one was a stripped out California car with no AC and very few accessories. Henry Hopkins had already gotten the drive-train and a bunch of other goodies that I already had on the blue car, so it came to me already part-way disassembled. I took it apart down to the frame/shell (as you will see), and intend to transfer everything that I want over from the blue car, restoring it in the process. All top surfaces of the car are rusted where the paint baked and oxidized in the Marin sun for 25 years. Those were very intimidating, but the car was really straight with great body integrity - none of the rust was cancerous, just surface stuff that needed to be prepped before painting.
This is what I proceeded to do:
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Sandblast the rusty areas. Noisy, slow, and irritating to the neighbors, but I
asked first. I bought 5 50lb bags of sand and poured them into the sand-blaster
hopper, a metal canister that might hold 3 gallons. The unit was a gravity feed
unit and worked OK. There's a hole at the bottom that feeds a hose with a gun at
the end and an attachment for your compressed air line. They make "pressurized"
units that have a seal-able canister where the sand is forced up the hose instead
of sucked. They probably work better, but mine was a borrowed unit, so the price
was right. I didn't take a picture of it before I returned it, but imagine that
they're not too expensive. When I had exhausted 3 bags of sand, which came
pretty quickly, I used the shop-vac to suck up as much sand and debris as
possible. There were large rust flakes in places and I just grabbed all of it.
I then went to Target and got a metal colander made of wire mesh. This was
slightly larger than the mouth of the 5-gallon paint can that I had, and I
poured the sand through the mesh into the paint bucket and filtered out the
large particles/dirt and was able to make 200 pounds of sand work like 1200.
Blasting itself required goggles, respirator (get one now if you plan to work on
your car!!), and ear protection. I also quickly switched from shorts and short
sleeves to heavy clothing and gloves. The sand ricochets everywhere, and will do
a real number on exposed skin. It doesn't look like much, but it will take paint
off the car, so your derma isn't happy with it when it rebounds back at you.
The sandblasted metal surface has a grainy feel to it, and was ready to be
prepped with rust-killer. I found that I had to go over places 2-3 times to
feel like all of the rust that I was likely to get at what gone. Some residual
rust was still embedded, but that would take a commercial rig and more air
pressure than I have. I am counting on the rust killers to keep what's still
there inert.
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