POR15 - the truth

There is still a lot of block sanding and bodywork to do on the car before it is ready for paint....and the hood, deck lid and fenders haven't even been started yet....but lately I have been ignoring these issues entirely and enjoying this view of my car again:

What I have been doing is working on restoring some more of the smaller parts that I will (one day) use to rebuild the car. I started by examining some of the parts I restored about a year ago. I used POR-15 to paint the rear axle housing and some of the brake parts, and I also used it on a few other items....like the door hinge mounting plates, and the brackets that go behind the rear valance. Inspection of these items showed evidence of bubbling at the paint surface, although it wasn't all that bad....

But when I checked out the leaf spring locator plates, it was worse: actual rust inside the bolt hole!

On the rear bumper internal brackets there was a huge bubble in the paint and an area where it had peeled off

When I skimmed over the surface with the wire wheel, I found the underlying metal thick with rust - it certainly wasn't like this when I painted over it!  

So what's all this then? Well, I was sceptical about POR-15 even when I originally used it on the rear end, because I've heard so many people, both personal friends and on the net, saying that it peels right back off. However, the manufacturers general response to this seems to be that it only peels off if you get water into the product....or in other words, if it peels off, you mixed it wrong. OK, so I have a past life as an organometallic* chemist (can I admit that here?), so I understand exactly what it means to exclude air (and thereby water vapor) at the parts-per-billion level....and I'm confident I did more than enough when I used the POR-15. And it still peeled off. And not just on one part, but on most of the stuff I painted. So I rest my case as this: "POR-15 is rubbish. It's worse than useless in fact."  I'm not claiming I'm the first person to say this (lol, probably not in the first 100,000!) but I'm adding my voice :)

(*Next time out I'll be reporting my own experiences on the chelation approach to rust removal so watch this space)

into the black

I was really happy with how the trunk came out, and I still had the garage covered in plastic, so next up was the engine bay. This area was painted with epoxy a little while back. I started the latest bit of masking by carefully covering up the read paint in the trunk area, and then I peeled back the covering at the front of the car.

I was careful also to cover up the floor where I previously painted clear coat.

I read a really useful article in Mustang Magazine about types of paint to use on the engine bay, and I settled on Dupli-color DE1635 Engine Enamel which is freely available at Kragen. Provided you mix (shake) the cans properly, this paint goes on great and is very affordable. I started on the outside, although I think it would have been easier the other way round, and all subsequent coats of paint were applied to the inside of the engine bay first.

All told I need about 3-4 coats to be happy with the coverage over the epoxy primer. However, a certain amount of sanding drips and sags in the paint followed by re-applying was needed before I was happy with entire area. Also, applying paint from a rattle can underneath the engine bay was a little bit challenging.

Took a bit more paint than I initially imagined...

So, time to unmask the body shell then? Well not quite actually. While I still had the most of the body masked off I took the opportunity to spray some rubberized coating into the rear wheel wells.

I also handed out the same treatment to those areas behind the fenders where road damage usually has the highest impact.

Here's how the body shell came out after I removed the masking and cleaned up the garage.

into the red

What color to paint your car? It's a tough question, in fact one of my friends from BAMA agonized for two years before settling on the merlot jewel metallic paint job you can see below for his 65 fastback. For me it was a decision I made before I bought my car: I was never intending to repaint (or restore...) the car originally, so I chose what I wanted and bought that car. However, when you have everything back in primer, it's tempting to think about alternatives. I considered for a while changing the shade of red to something lighter or more orange, but that probably wouldn't have worked so well with the maroon interior, so I've decided I'm sticking with the original Ford Candy Apple Red (note: this is a solid color and not a candy-style paint job). The one thing that will be going though is the naff white roof my car had when I acquired it.

I'm still not decided on whether I'll be painting the entire car myself, although I'm leaning towards it, but I will be doing the jambs, underside of the hood and deck lid, and inside the trunk. I mentioned in my last post about how converting my garage into a paint booth takes a lot of effort, so I decided I would do a bit more than just the epoxy primer. I picked the trunk as my starting point because I wanted to have a go at spraying urethane base coat/clear coat somewhere where it doesn't matter - most of the trunk will be covered up with mats, spare wheel etc, so I couldn't really go wrong. A lot of the car was already masked off from painting over the new body work so I just had to expose the trunk and seal it off from the rest of the car.

It doesn't show that well in the pictures, but before I started painting I scuffed up the trunk real good with a scotchbrite and wiped down with denatured alcohol. Then I laid down a thin coat of PPG DP74LF red oxide epoxy primer which I mixed 2:1 with DP401LF activator as usual and then added one part of acetone (so a 2:1:1 overall ratio). While the primer was flashing I mixed up the urethane base coat: I used PPG DBC "K" Color to which I added DT870 medium reducer in a 1:1 ratio. I sprayed on two coats with a 45 minute flash time. I followed up with two coats of urethane clear made up of four parts of DCU2021 with  one part DT870 reducer and one part DCX61 urethane hardener (4:1:1). It came out really well with just a few (mostly inconspicuous I hope) runs.

At the same time I did a bit of work on the gas tank. Started by masking off the top side:

Then I scuffed up the underside and sprayed on a very thin layer of epoxy primer and two coats of clear coat. This look will match the underside of the car.

I let the clear coat harden overnight and then masked it off before scuffing up the topside/trunk floor.

The top side got the red base coat as well as the clear because I want it to match the trunk, even though it will be mostly covered up. This came out really nice without any runs. So happy with my choice of color!