The Great Pumpkin - '71 Duster
Underside work continues. There's no free lunch but this feels like it's never going to end. I hope to be done with the cleaning this weekend though that seems like a tall order.
Got me a $20 HF siphon feed spot blaster to get at the hard-to-reach surface rust. I'm impressed with it so far. Obviously not the best tool for the job but it's performing better than I expected. I owe it to my beast of a compressor. When blasting it pretty much stays on but it keeps up. The other thing that seems to be helping is the water filter attachment. It prevents the media form getting wet and clumping in the hopper and then clogging the gun. So far it's just been point, shoot for a few minutes then refill the hopper.
To prevent glass bead material from getting everywhere and into everything I made a make-shift blasting booth with heavy plastic sheeting. I used heavy duty spring clips to attach the top of the plastic to the trunk gutter and drip rails and draped it over the sides. On the bottom I put some 2x6s over the bottom of the sheet to keep it in place and prevent the media from getting out. Hard to see it but there's also plastic stretched across between the lift arms.
Yeah, there's still dust everywhere but without the plastic it would be 10x worse. This is really an outdoor job best done with the body on a rotisserie but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do to move things forward. Don't get me wrong, I am thankful to have the room and ability to do this even if it's not the ideal situation. I did save some money doing it this way though the next project definitely goes to the media blasting place.
Inside the blasting room. Note the pile of contained media. You can make out my Coronet beyond the plastic. It's covered with both a layer of body shop plastic and an outdoor type tarp to prevent any errant abrasive granules from leaving their marks in the QQ1.
Looking rearward at the inside of the rear valance/bumper bracket bolt. This whole area was all heavy surface rust. Can still see a little left but obviously we're going in the right direction here.
Rear frame rail kickup. There's no way to get these surfaces this clean with mere chemicals or even a wire wheel. I know this because I tried! Didn't work!
Also getting the trunk cleaned up. Ran into sort of an odd situation with what seemed like rust in the panel ribs but turned out it was really oxidized paint with air bubbles in it. I spoke to a friend who just finished a high-end resto on his own car and he said he saw the same thing when he was taking his car down to bare metal. It's all cleaned up now though.
There actually was some surface rust under the seam sealer around the spare tire hold down bracket (see above) so there is a little pitting but otherwise it's pretty clean in the spare tire well. The dark areas are primer, not rust. One thing's for sure, Ma Mopar was not stingy with the seam sealer.
All in a day's work down in the coal mine.
More to come.
Underside work continues. There's no free lunch but this feels like it's never going to end. I hope to be done with the cleaning this weekend though that seems like a tall order.
Got me a $20 HF siphon feed spot blaster to get at the hard-to-reach surface rust. I'm impressed with it so far. Obviously not the best tool for the job but it's performing better than I expected. I owe it to my beast of a compressor. When blasting it pretty much stays on but it keeps up. The other thing that seems to be helping is the water filter attachment. It prevents the media form getting wet and clumping in the hopper and then clogging the gun. So far it's just been point, shoot for a few minutes then refill the hopper.
To prevent glass bead material from getting everywhere and into everything I made a make-shift blasting booth with heavy plastic sheeting. I used heavy duty spring clips to attach the top of the plastic to the trunk gutter and drip rails and draped it over the sides. On the bottom I put some 2x6s over the bottom of the sheet to keep it in place and prevent the media from getting out. Hard to see it but there's also plastic stretched across between the lift arms.
Yeah, there's still dust everywhere but without the plastic it would be 10x worse. This is really an outdoor job best done with the body on a rotisserie but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do to move things forward. Don't get me wrong, I am thankful to have the room and ability to do this even if it's not the ideal situation. I did save some money doing it this way though the next project definitely goes to the media blasting place.
Inside the blasting room. Note the pile of contained media. You can make out my Coronet beyond the plastic. It's covered with both a layer of body shop plastic and an outdoor type tarp to prevent any errant abrasive granules from leaving their marks in the QQ1.
Looking rearward at the inside of the rear valance/bumper bracket bolt. This whole area was all heavy surface rust. Can still see a little left but obviously we're going in the right direction here.
Rear frame rail kickup. There's no way to get these surfaces this clean with mere chemicals or even a wire wheel. I know this because I tried! Didn't work!
Also getting the trunk cleaned up. Ran into sort of an odd situation with what seemed like rust in the panel ribs but turned out it was really oxidized paint with air bubbles in it. I spoke to a friend who just finished a high-end resto on his own car and he said he saw the same thing when he was taking his car down to bare metal. It's all cleaned up now though.
There actually was some surface rust under the seam sealer around the spare tire hold down bracket (see above) so there is a little pitting but otherwise it's pretty clean in the spare tire well. The dark areas are primer, not rust. One thing's for sure, Ma Mopar was not stingy with the seam sealer.
All in a day's work down in the coal mine.
More to come.