OK! Slow night in the garage, taxes are off to the tax man...I give up this year....toooo many circles to chase...not zeros....!
So I'll take this time to back up just a tad and post the pics of the frame work that you all missed between those back at the end of page 6, until I hit the primer!
Please do not mistake the smile on my face in any pictures as being from enjoyment......my wife picked up the camera and said that she wanted to document her view of me working on the car during the week.....this was my "crunch" to beat the downturn in weather temps...which hasn't quite returned yet! (Good painting weather!)
Stripping the chassis for painting, scraping, sanding, deburring, cleaning, treating, and then covering everything up that you don't want painted....was a 7-8 day marathon! I think...now, it all seems like a blur!!!
Here she caught me in a typical position for a couple of days with the stripper!
No true mechanic is without his trusty junk yard dog...Pepper. Mine warns me of impending deliveries by UPS drivers! The local driver has been getting a good blow by blow on the car with each piece he delivers!
OK, enough old men and pets...the following progresses through stripper on the engine compartment panels, then stripping the frame, then sanding...
Here is the engine compartment after stripper and brushing, and water/soap cleaning to neutralize any stripper.
Getting down in the chassis with stripper and brush! Working on RH side:
View from the other side:
We pause for a word from our sponsor....and scraper... Pretty danged tired of sitting in this chassis!
Working on the other side:
Occasionally I busted out a small file and worked down any burrs or welding spatter that I encountered. The latter required a hammer and sharp tiny chisel to convince them that they no longer needed to be there! (Picture is a little out of focus...sorry!)
Agony of sanding....soooo tired of sanding! 220 or 180 grit works well....by hand...because most of it is by hand...because my whippy dippy new orbital sander fit only in about 35% of the spaces...then there are 4 sides to ever piece of frame rail, frame rail reinforcement.....
OK, I do believe that this now the point I was at for being done sanding. This process took one day longer than my estimates. Like I said, the chassis had much more to it in terms of hard to get at real estate, and I underestimated the time it would take to do each side.... There are some areas that were slightly pitted due to rust behind the heat shields. I sanded these as much as possible to remove the high spot surface rust.
Next shots are of the metal after hitting it with "MetalPrep" a solution of muriatic acid to remove any surface rust and oils. Brush on, keep wet by brushing on more, and then rinse off with water. I used water and a sponge to wash it down. You can see that some etching remained. Following this, I treated the metal with a galvanizing agent, GalvaPrep. Again, brush on, keep wet, then rinse well, and dry. Some of the discoloring of the rust still remains in the deepest of craters. Only way to get that out would be to media blast and that is way too messy for this job. The self etching primer sealer will serve as a barrier to any more continued oxidation.
Next two shots are of the areas that I found small cracks in. Strange little reinforcement and the fact that they were both cracked means that this area of the chassis was moving somehow...
These are located just above the bolts for the lower inner a-arm attaching point.
Here you can see the e-brake cable that I managed to bust off moving around in the chassis to remove paint.... I think it was already cracked...
At this point, this fills the void between taking off the insulation and green primer and eventually silver paint!
Next post will cover from silver paint to present!
Steve
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