Sunday, September 30, 2012

small is beautiful

Once I was happy with the magic rust removal solution (ie exactly one day after I started using it!) I spent a while collecting together every small part that could possibly benefit from treatment....and then systematically soaked everything in batches. While this was going on I also stripped the old paint off of some of the other small parts that I was planning to refinish. It wasn't long before I had a growing pile of pristine, original parts.


I converted my garden shed into a spray booth so that I could get the nice shinny parts painted as quickly as possible. Anything that originally had the appearance of bare metal got painted with my favorite Eastwood Brake Gray over a light coat of etching primer.

finished marker light brackets
floor plugs
I decided it would be most time efficient to refurbish a few parts that I'm not even 100% sure I'll be reusing (like the fuel line attaching bracket, below) while I had my Production Facilities/Paint Booth fully operational, rather than coming back to this stuff later on.


By this time I was accumulating another large pile of empty rattle cans in the shed.


The black parts got hit with at least two coats of the same Duplicolor paint I used on the engine compartment.

window winding mechanism thing (!)
clutch and brake pedals
horns
brackets from somewhere inside the door
headlamp inner buckets
Most of the shed was black too by this point...
I painted the tail light buckets with some chrome-look paint on the outside, and then I used some duplicolor brilliant white on the inside - this took a lot of masking and re-masking to achieve, but the white is much better for reflecting light than chrome or gray would be. At this point I have finished pretty much all of the small parts that will have a paint finish - so in other words the garage is still stacked full of boxes of parts, but now more than half of them are ready to go back :)

8 comments:

  1. Wow! Very nice job. I'll be remembering your process down the road when I get to those small pieces-parts.

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  2. Wow, you make me sorry that I spent so much time with my blast cabinet. Chelation kicks a**!

    Nice painting there too, btw.

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    1. Thanks Alex...if I had a blast cabinet/decent compressor, I probably would have used that too, may even have bought one...but thanks to Sven I didn't have to :)

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  3. NIce work! Saved a lot of money too. And there's nothing like a brand-new original part. Beats a repro anytime.

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    1. Thanks! And agree about repro parts - the whole point of this process was to use as many original parts as possible. And I have ;)

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  4. Man! That is some pro-level work there. Very nice!

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    1. Thank you - couldn't have done it without your input :)

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  5. Great work there!! I have some parts that I'm gonna restore / re-use. I have some that I've sent off but nothing beats using the original! Nice work!!

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