Paint removal and repairs on the body shell
As in the article about paint removal I have used the process with the heat gun and oscillating sander for removing all the paint. I did find some poor repairs and some additional rust damage witch is now corrected. The outer side of the body have now been painted with an epoxy based primer of good quality. Good adherence to the bare metal is crucial in order to have a good rust protection.
Now its time to take care of the under side of the car. Almost all the rust repairs are done but the owner of the car wants a nice finish to the underside, so there is a lot of work to be done. The reason that the underside has not been blasted is due to a misunderstanding between us (me and the owner) and the blaster guy. After some inspection of the underside of the body, I found some more rust that needs to be done. We have decided to take the body to the sandblaster when the sheet metal work is done, because there is a lot of surface rust in some inaccesible areas. The sandblaster can reach into these areas and he will thereafter coat the areas he´s blasted with zinc that wil be melted and the sprayed on. This will give a very good protection against rust. The only drawback is that the body will have to be cleaned again from all the blasting material in all the cavaties. There is a vast amount of cleaning with compressed air when a body shell like this one, since it is a uni-body and it is reasonable emptied from the remains of the soda and sand. Trust me, its everywhere!
As you can see, there are some old repairs that are OK by the technical standards for the danish technical control of automobiles. But as you can see it´s not the prettiest job, so it will have to be fixed. Also the underside is rusty at some places and there are some rests of asphalt that needs to be removed. This car has been used in Denmark where we have a coastal climate with cold winters and with salt on the roads during the winter, so rust is very common. As I use to say "Us, real men, are not afraid of rust, we just cry a little more often".
In the 60 ´s and 70´s a car could almost disappear in a matter of a few years if the owner neglected a proper anti-rust treatment within a short period after the purchase. When I restored my own car I removed close to 30 kilos of old asphalt before I had a surface that looked something like this one, and I still had some repairs to do.