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...

Posted by pbrown at February 3, 2003 03:24 PM