Project 240K

The sandblaster had been delayed with some equipment failures and general bad weather, but got an update today with some pictures. The shell is completely stripped along with the doors and front quarter panels. Only the bonnet and boot lid remain to be done.

The majority of rust seems to be around previous (rust) repaired areas, and looks like a little bit of accident damage in the rear drivers side quarter. Spoke to the body shop next door for them to quote on fixing it up, he seems to think that the shell is actually quite good and finding a better one would be difficult, but there are a number of areas to be attended to.
I had originally planned just to get it epoxy primed and the underside/engine bay painted.. leave the bodywork until later, however i am starting to think that this will just end up costing me more in the long run and that maybe i am better off leaving it up there for a while, paying them in installments to complete the work required in batches (which of course is substantial.. as any thing is in this car game).

In any event, it seems that it will take a little longer than i had planned  for me to get the engine in.

The 240Z shell has sold (and only in 2 days), so i decided to “re-invest” the money into the 240K.

My wife and I decided it would be a good time to get the 240K sandblasted and epoxy coated.

I had been in contact with Cam at Imperial Blasting (up in Beresfield, near Newcastle), and in conjunction with their next door neighbour Kranky Kustoms, they are going to rush the job through for me, getting the shell and bonnet completely sand blasted and epoxy primed, then paint the underside and engine bay in 2012 Mercedes-Benz Mars Red

To get the car to the blaster, i had to build up a set of wheeled skids that clipped between the underside rails. Once these were made, and the car was off the rotisserie, the car was wheel-able once more (though i personally think 16″ wheels were better looking). It took a bit of effort to get the car down the driveway (an electric winch helped) and onto the trailer.. the car spent a little time resting on the rear  spare wheel well (hopefully not too much damage) due to the attack angle of the trailer vs the driveway slope – should have made the skids bigger.. but they did work and didn’t collapse as i was expecting them to

Luckily the car made it to Newcastle in one piece. Hopefully i should hear back in the next few days on the progress and get some update pictures up.

Managed to get a day off work today,

so spent the day sitting in the shell, chipping off the factory applied underbody deadener out of the foot wells on the car.  Easiest method was with a small thin chisel and a hammer until direct sunlight on the deadener started to make it a bit gooey.  Managed to chip of all the drivers side, and half of the passenger side, revealing a little surface rust on the bare metal underneath where water had obviously gotten under pockets of the deadener sheets.

Also tried chipping off the black deadener mat from the inside of the firewall, man that is stuck on well! could only chip off the areas that had a bubble from the formed metal underneath, anywhere flat looks like it is stuck on there for good! i did find a large pocket of water and a bit of surface rust in the centre “X” stamping below the mat though.. obviously it made its way there after the pressure cleaning from the week before.

After a good couple of weekends of rain, we finally managed to get the 240K mounted onto the rotisserie, and after a small wheel failure (one of the wheels on the stand bent and snapped off as we tried to get it into the garage) we were finally in the position to try and get it onto it’s side.

The instructions for the rotisserie asked us to count on the large 3 foot threaded bolt at the top of the rotisserie to adjust the car’s centre of gravity up and down the stand, somehow I just couldn’t trust this with a 500kg shell! so instead we dug out the large trolley jack and a couple of blocks of wood to make the adjustments.

After a couple of trials (guesses) at where the car’s COG would be, we finally found a setting that allowed the car to rotate 90 degrees without too much effort. The rotisserie has 2 large bolts on each end which clamp down on the main rotating cylinder (without any holes to “lock into”), again, we didn’t trust this so used a long piece of wood (and a couple of metal bars) to wedge the car and arm in place.

It was a weird sight, seeing the car set up this way, but there was no doubt, it gives awesome access to the underside! the Plan was to strip the underside back to bare metal and epoxy prime, but the bottom of the car (bar some grease around the transmission) is as immaculate as the top side is. Instead, we will give the underside a good scrub to get rid of any grime, then give it a good etch and then epoxy prime it.

Mark also started scraping off some of the previous bog work off the rear. The car appears to have been repaired well for rust previously (there is a lot of good metal under it), though it doesn’t appear to have had any rust converter put on it. The majority is good, though bubbles of rust have started again in some of the usual areas… but no where near as much as i have seen in other cars. While we were removing the last of the remaining rubber bungs, we also cut out the battery tray. The underside of which, showed no rust at all, another good sign of this car’s past!

It was good to actually have some validation for my decision to sell the old 240K!

It was a difficult decision, as there was nothing fundamentally wrong with my current car (plus the countless hours spent stripping and priming it!), but everyone i had asked had concluded that the new car was too good to let go (probably only for the fact that this car was “complete” and not just a shell that had been sitting around for way too long!)

I decided to base the final descision on the bodywork, if i had a good poke around and didn’t find anything substantially wrong then i could somehow justify the changeover I pulled of all the trim, took out the interior, checked the firewall, floorpan, boot, engine bay, window frames, doglegs.. nothing substantial, other than a few small areas around the front and rear windows (obviously where the glass had been refitted at some stage), and a small bit of rust from the trim strips under the doors. There were of course the odd bits here and there, but nothing bigger than a fingernail.

The descision was made.. I was going with the new car! which meant pulling everything off my 240K and swapping them over. The side benefit was that i could fully document it all and finally get some pictures of the finer details for things like the suspension. the decision would mean however, selling my “old” car at some stage in the near future, so expect to see that on the market as soon (if your interested, hit me up through the “contact me” at the top of the website) as i get it all together!

As i had decided before, if you are going to go to the trouble and expense of getting a car painted, there is no point doing it and the having it rust/bubble a couple of years down the track, this meant that i would be, for the 3rd time this project, stripping a car back to bare metal!

Luckily a rotisserie with 240K attachments came up on the forums, so i took the plunge and bought it from him (i figure if i am going to do it, may as well do it properly!).. In the meantime, i stripped the rear suspension and crossmember from the old car, and replaced it with that from the new one.