the best of the green room

A lot happened on this project in the year it was housed in The Green Room. Without question it was the most productive portion of the project so far, and that includes a four month period where hardly anything happened at all. Looking back at photographs of the project over this time really helped get my motivation to keep moving forward in the next few months.

my block sanding vacation part two

So after two full days of filling and sanding, I was ready to paint....or should I say ready to start preparing to paint. The first thing to do was try and rid the garage of all the dust I produced while sanding body filler. This actually took a lot of effort. I swept up the worst of it, but there's only so much you can do with a broom, so I got the compressor going and blew everything towards the door and out into the world (it's only dust, right?), and finished up by wetting down the floor and sweeping again.

Great, onto the car itself. I gave the bodywork a thorough wipe down with shop towels soaked in denatured alcohol. Then I broke out the masking paper and tape and got stuck in. I masked off the trunk and the window and door openings first, and then covered up everything forward of the firewall which I already painted with epoxy primer.

Ok, so getting to the end of day three now, but at least I'm ready to spray the primer. I had just enough epoxy leftover from the engine compartment, but I didn't plan on my paint gun breaking down about three quarters of the way through. This was a major PITA, as I was forced to complete the job with a touch up gun, and it shows, particularly in the second picture below. Fortunately it doesn't really matter, because I'll be doing a bunch more sanding of the car anyway, but it's still annoying.

Last day: I began by applying seam sealer to the drip rails - I didn't take pictures but I used a lot of masking tape while I was doing this and it was well worth it as the process is really messy. After the sealer had time to dry I covered it up with a coat of epoxy using the now-more-appropriate touch-up gun.

While the primer was drying I went over to a buddy's house to pick up a substitute paint gun - one a good deal better than the cheap piece of tat I started with - and then I started preparing for the final part of my block sanding vacation: clear coating the underside of the car.

There has been much discussion on VMF recently about the wisdom of painting urethane clear coat directly over epoxy primer; the reasons for not doing so include:

1. The paint manufacturer does not recommend doing so without the appropriate layer of base coat in between.
2. Clear coat is not as tough as the primer, so the surface will actually be more prone to damage from flying stop chips, road debris etc.
3. The shinny appearance isn't concours correct.
4. One of the purposes of clear coat is to add UV protection, but you don't really need that under the car.

All of these points have their own merits, and you can add to the list that it's costly and time consuming...but then isn't everything, so I came up with my own list of reasons for doing it anyway:

1. The key to paint compatibility is really to do with surface preparation and application, plus I don't think that base coat and clear coat are chemically all that different, they're both urethanes, so that's point one dealt with provided I scuff up the existing primer to give the surface some "tooth".
2. Clear coat may well be easier to scratch than primer, but it still provides additional protection to the metal underneath - you can't scratch primer at all if it's covered with something else, can you.
3. Nothing on my car has been done to make it "correct" because I couldn't care less about concours requirements; I'm building the car I want.
4. I happen to like the look of shinny stuff more that dull, so that's that.

Here's the masked off look:

And here's how the underside came out after the clear coat dried: all nice and shinny!

my block sanding vacation part one

One summer back in the midst of my youth I found myself working in a factory that manufactured wallpaper sample books. A good deal of this work consisted of sticking rectangular pieces of border paper on top of square pieces of wallpaper...by hand. It wasn't the most stimulating or fulfilling endeavor, to say the least, and as a result the area of the factory where folks toiled away at this onerous task - in fact just a large group of tables in the center of the building - was collectively known as "the patch"....on the basis that you had to be a cabbage* to work there!

Suffice to say, management were not overly keen on this phrase being bandied about, but it did tend to (cough..) crop up quite a lot, for example a co-worker might be heard to comment: "Tim was late again this morning, now he's stuck on the patch" or perhaps "that new guy is awful, he'll be on the patch before the end of the week" and so on. I was hardly ever late, and never misbehaved with the boss's daughter (his son was an only child!), so fortunately my exposure to life on the patch was minimal. Still, over the years, memories have occasionally flashed before my eyes, usually when I've found myself doing something mind numbingly boring....which brings me on to the real point of this post: block sanding.

I've been dreading the body-filler part of this project for a number of reasons, not least because just one quarter panel was enough to stop the Restoration King in his tracks...but eventually the time came when there was nothing for it but to take the plunge. I started out by investing in a set of Durablocks™ and some rolls of self-adhesive sandpaper in various grades and I tapped into my friend Chuck for some advice on technique before I got started.

I also did some reading up on what type of body filler to use - my only experience of using filler prior to this project was when I helped my father plaster it over his Consul sometime in the early 80s....we even used some chicken wire too I recall.  This time I chose to go with Evercoat's Rage Extreme, based amongst other things on this review.

But, hold on, before I actually got started I had to battle though a severe bout of can't-be-bothered-with-this-project-ever-again-itis. Then, after a week or so of being entirely consumed by this illness, I noticed some very small rust spots forming on the car bodywork (!) which was exactly what I needed to spur me into immediate action! In fact the turnaround from lack of interest to desperation was so rapid that I booked two days off work next to the weekend, and vowed to have the car in primer by the end of day four. To start with, here's a picture of the filler being mixed - every bodywork blog I've ever read has a version of this picture, so I had to include my own. I found a huge box of mirror tiles in my garage when I moved in and I found they make excellent filler-mixing surfaces.

The worst damage was at the driver side quarter panel, so that's where I began:

The first footprint in the dust. By the time I was done sanding, there was dust everywhere in the garage, but I was careful to keep it out of the house!

My basic methodology was to apply the filler, give it 20 minutes to harden, and then attack it with my seventeen inch long board and some 80 grit sand paper...and then repeat the process. For the first few cycles I was mainly concerned with knocking down the high spots in the body work, but eventually, thanks to my favorite BFH I came out the winner. Here's the car at the end of the first day with one quarter panel well on the way.

Day two and time to move onto the roof and A-pillars:

I was still struggling with boredom, but after a day and a half I had refined my technique such that I was applying less filler each time and doing less sanding on each iteration...after the roof was taken care of I moved onto the passenger rear quarter and the then the tail light panel.

The funny thing is, the more time and effort I put in, the more I wanted a great result...but you have to stop somewhere, and anyway I'll be doing a lot more filling and sanding after the first coat of epoxy, so I didn't beat myself up too much over getting it absolutely perfect. Essentially I worked on getting it as good as I could by the end of day two, and then to wrap up I gave the entire car a light going over with 120 grit and called it done. Coming in part two: clean up and paint....so stay tuned.

*cab·bage [kab-ij], noun,
1. Any of several cultivated varieties of a plant, Brassica oleracea capitata, of the mustard family, having a short stem and leaves formed into a compact, edible head.
2. (Chiefly British Informal) (a) a stupid, dull, or spiritless person (b) a mentally impaired person who is unable to live independently; vegetable.

I'm done with strippers

So one more session of stripping off paint and cleaning up around the edges of the trunk and door openings and I was all done. At last I can say that every bit of original paint has been removed - and about twice as much non-original paint went with it. When it was finally all gone I gave the car a good scrub down to remove all the mess from the paint stripper, and then dried it all really good with shop towels and the compressed air blower. Here's how it came out:

Time to deal with the rust at the edge of the roof and the A-pillars. Here's how it looked after I scraped off the paint. At first I was really worried about the extent of the rust because I really didn't want to have to start sectioning part of the roof, but fortunately it wasn't that bad.

I started by grinding away every bit of rust I possibly could, and then sanding some more after that. I was really careful not to sand any of the lead filler where the roof joins the A-pillar. This took care of the majority of the rust.

What was left was treated with rust converter, and left overnight to dry, and then lightly sanded the next day...I hope this works!

There were a good many places on the car where the paint has been chipped off in the past, and rust spots have formed, the front of the roof being a prime example. I used a small wire wheel on the drill to deal with these imperfections; later on I'll be skim coating the roof.

I did the same just below the tail light openings - the rust in this area no doubt comes from water getting inside the tail light housing, from where it cannot escape....next time out I'll be cracking open the body filler!