February 2003 Archives

When we last left off, I was working on finishing undercoat removal. Well, I'm more or less done with that. At least with the parts of the undercoat removal that I can get to and that I'm going to do. I've left the floor pan, battery box, and longitudinals largely unscraped, because they are getting replaced and there is no point in giving them attention. That was a lot of heating and scraping. Not too fun. I estimate that all told, I collected somewhere on the order of 50-75 lbs of undercoat and dirt from the wheel wells and rear area behind the engine. The only part I think I will need to work on more will be the area under and around the engine, but I can't do that until I drop the engine.

Alex and I were going to drop the engine this weekend, but he ran out of time so we will get to it soon. In the meantime I have resumed interior disassembly and removal. Steering wheel, gauges, glove compartment, radio, various dash knobs, etc. It is not always easy because you have to lie on the floor pan and peer up underneath the dash a lot to see what you are doing. Also it is not documented in the service manual or much of the other literature. Most of it is straightforward, but not all. For instance, I'm stuck right now removing a piece of housing from the steering column that is behind the turn switch. Hopefully 356talk will come through again. What a great resource.

I still need to call the media blaster.

I think I have located an engine. No really this time. A 1964 C, which should work very well indeed.

So I'm done with work. Maybe a bit of a story about that sometime later. In the meantime, let's stick to the car.

Again, the weather has consipired against me and I haven't had as much opportunity as I would like to work on the car. We had another snowstorm two days ago (OK, more of a sleet/ice storm) and it has been too cold to even work in the garage. My architect was here today measuring household dimensions in anticipation of plans he will be drawing up for some work on our house, including a new 3 car garage with workshop. Unfortunately, I don't think the construction will be completed in time to be highly relevant to this particular project. Oh well, planning for the future.

More undercoat removalMostly, the work I have gotten done in the past week or so has been more grunt-variety dirty work. I have gotten one of the front wheelwells mostly scraped of undercoat (they are bigger than the rears), and the big achievement for this afternoon was removing the gas tank. Yes, all the rubber collars, seals, bushings, etc. in my car are completely shot, as I had feared. The lack of solid rubber seals on the gas tank were probably contributing to some of the "gas smells" in the passenger compartment. They certainly weren't helping.

The good news on the tank is that it isn't too rusty. OK, it does have some surface rust, but peering inside with a flashlight, it doesn't look bad. Some grit and varnish-crud in there, I will get a tank treatment and clean it. The worst area is the filler neck. Quite a bit of surface rust in there. I don't think it merits the full-on gas tank sealer treatment, though. If people know otherwise, please tell me.

The fuel cock looks like hell and definitely needs to get rebuilt. There was some leaking at the junction between fuel cock and tank, and the gas seepage over the years, combined with road tar and undercoat, formed a nice goo that I had to spend about 1/2 hour scraping off the bottom of the tank. Helped preserve it though!

Now that the gas tank is out, it is easier to look at the front suspension members (torsion bar tube, sway bar, tie rods, steering box, etc). They are all very greasy. A combination of gas, grease, undercoat, and road muck combined in a sticky black mess that will be a pain to clean but it needs at least some attention. I mean, it is sometimes hard to make out individuals nuts and bolts because they are so caked with crud! Pictures will follow.

Tomorrow I should have a bunch of time for the car. I'm going to hopefully finish scraping all relevant undercoating. If I get that done, I'm going to work on gauge removal, and then I may return to attack the door frames once again.

Over the weekend, I spent a couple more hours practicing welding. I have gotten quite good at doing Amateur spot welds plug welds. However, my ability at doing butt welds/lap welds is poor. I either end up blowing through the thin sheetmetal, or getting poor penetration when I turn the voltage down to compensate. More practice is definitely needed in this area before I'll feel confident. I ordered Welder's Handbook by Robert Finch, on the recommendation of several reviews. No book will substitute for hands on training and practice, but it may be able to give me some tips to help flatten the learning curve.

I've been expanding my search for a different engine for the car. A bit premature, what with the body of the car not being nearly done, but I'm very interested in working on an engine rebuild, and I have no interest in disassembling/rebuilding the current 1600 normal motor. 912 engines are in seemingly greater supply than C/SC motors, and I have a couple of leads. I'll post an update if I make a deal.

I did talk to Frank at Amick Motors, he argued/reasoned with me that after I get most of the undercoat off, I will be much more pleased with the final results if I have the remainder of the undercarriage sandblasted and then have the rest of the body and interior media blasted. He suggested Ellis Media Blasting in Greensboro, NC. It will cost a few hundred dollars but I think he is right. Enough waffling on that area of things already!

Here is a link to lots of pictures from Dunkel's Swapmeet that took place last weekend in California. Lots of great pictures, lots of ideas for how I want my car to look.

On a closing note, I've resigned from my job for a whole variety of reasons. Time to do some thinking about where my life and career are headed. In an unintended but pleasant fashion, this will provide me with a lot of time to work on the car in the next few months.

Undercoat removal is a bitch.

I'm still not sure whether what I am removing is factory undercoat, or something applied on top of the original undercoat. In places like the back of the door lock striker plate, the very top of the wheel wells where body meets frame, and near the torsion bar cover it is very thick. My arm is sore today from spending about 3 hours last night working on it with my putty knife.

At the start of my undercoat-attack yesterday I tried a suggestion I had read about from several sources: application of thick paint stripper to the undercoat. Maybe it worked for those people, but for me, it wasn't helping much. And maybe that is because I have so much mud and grime caked on top of my undercoat, or for some other reason, but the heavy duty Zip Strip wasn't really making an appreciable impact.

wheelwell without undercoatingWhat to turn to? Another suggestion was to use heat. I've heard enough about the negative aspects of heat on body panels (namely, potential for warping) to be careful. I used my heat gun to heat the stubborn areas until I could just see the thin parts of the undercoat starting to melt.

Then I stopped and scraped. The coating was much more pliable that before heating and easier to remove. It still leaves a tar-like residue that I hope to be able to clean up with paint thinner or turpentine, but I think this is the only way I'm going to be able to finish the job by hand. I haven't used a sand blaster before, but I really don't understand how a blaster would be able to remove this stuff. It has too much "give." Perhaps someone can enlighten me. In any case, I have the majority of the gunk removed from both rear wheel wells. Getting at the stuff behind the engine tray on the inside rear of the body is going to be pretty difficult. It may be easier with the engine out. I hope to get the engine out in the next few weeks.

I worked on the car for about an our today. The weather has warmed up quite a bit, and it was too nice to not do something. I started out by jacking it back up, and then removing the left rear wheel. I had tentatively poked at the undercoating a bit a month or so ago and decided it was going to be a real "project." Eh. eh heh. heh heh heh. That is so understating the situation.

At some point previous in the car's life, I believe one of the owners decided to "add a bit" to the car's factory undercoating. Hey, if one layer of bad gunk is good, more is certainly better, right? I'm fairly certain that the same substance sprayed into the doors (see below) was liberally applied to the whole underbody of the car: floor pan, wheel wells, all of it. Except the engine. Or, maybe it was applied to the engine too, the original engine, which has since departed, as we also discovered earlier.

Anyway, back in mid-December or so, I took the car to the local do-it-yourself carwash and tried to blast off as much underbody gunk (grime, dirt, oil, you know, 40 years of buildup) as possible. And quite a bit came off! But not nearly all of it, as I discovered this evening. On top of the undercoating is a thick layer of mud. Caked on mud that has almost become part of the undercoating. Scraping it off seems to be the only way to go. I used a grinder with a wire brush wheel attachment for about 10 seconds before I realized that the amount of dust generated was going to kill me even with a dust mask on. I may be able to use the grinder to "finish up," but the majority of the work is going to be purely manual.

I got one wheel well mostly done. It took about an hour. Not too bad I guess. I'll have to remove the shock to get at the area behind it, and there are some other tight nooks and crannies, but if anyone has suggestions on how to speed this up, send a message to 356talk and let us all know.

I also unpacked the rest of the panels from Restoration Design. They all look very good. In fact, the front nose piece I mentioned below that doesn't look "perfect" is the worst of the bunch. It will do just fine regardless. My new front bumper arrived as well. It's old stock from Tweeks that I found on eBay for a steal. Funny how people buy things intending to use them, never do, and then have to unload them for a loss. I shouldn't point fingers though...