Project 240K

Cut out the roll cage, and The car sold today, and was picked up.. sad day.. but glad to get some extra space again.. it has been a LONG time since i have been down to 1 car (the Z doesn’t count yet)

just waiting on one of the adaptors for the rotisserie to arrive, then it’s game on!

Another day of prepping the car (using marine clean then metal ready), sealing any joints then spraying epoxy primer.

It is great to see the 240K lines reappearing again.

I also re-sealed many of the lines in the engine bay as some of the epoxy had cracked over the previous application (probably not major, but better safe than sorry!)

This weekend i managed to spend almost 2 whole days on the car,

Saturday i spent paint stripping the entire engine bay of POR, It took almost 6 hours to fully strip the engine bay (lots and lots of small areas to try and scrape paint out of!) while i had the time i also stripped the doors of the car. Although it doesn’t look like much, it certainly looked good in bare metal again! luckily not much rust had appeared from under the POR. there were a few small areas though starting to rust, mainly battery tray and the underside front valance

The following day, i started washing down the car using a pressure washer, followed by hand scrubbing with POR’s marine clean (a heavy duty water based degreaser), rinsed it off again, then rinsed the car down with POR’s metal ready ( a rust treatment). Metal ready has to be kept wet on the car for at least 10 minutes, and during this time, you can see the metal brightening up, before finally turning into a greenish/white tint (what they call salt and peppered).

Once the metal ready was once more washed and scrubbed off with clean water, i hit the metalwork with a Random orbital sander and 80 grit paper to key the surface for the epoxy primer. One last important step before priming, was to apply a mastic body sealer on all the joins within the engine bay.

Spraying the epoxy primer this time seemed much easier, i learnt my lesson from last week and followed the recommended 15cm between gun and panel guide. I was afraid that this would cause a lot of runs, but the paint seemed to lay down quite well. the only exceptions were on the drivers door where my hose kept getting caught on the ground causing me to pause for too long.. this should sand out.

I managed to complete a single coat on the roof and 2 doors, and 2 coats of paint in the engine bay (all up using roughly 1 Litre of mixed paint!)

We also finished off some of the long standing rust repairs in the rear dog legs of the car, rust had basically eaten through the inner and outer metal frames. POR15 has been applied within now to hopefully protect them in future, and we will also inject some wax into these areas after the Epoxy has been applied on the outside

There are only a few remaining holes to fill now (though the areas we have fixed up probably still need a bit of work to make them flatter), mainly along the bottom of the rear valance, and a couple under the dashboard of the car.

After doing a bit of research on the internet, i decided that the first step in the paint process should be to lay down a coat of epoxy primer over the “metal ready” treated bare metal. I selected Dupont’s 840R epoxy surfacer for the job. The plan is to prepare the car as much as possible before sending it off to a professional to complete the job. Hopefully we can get the body straight enough to save some time and money!

since we have a 100 Litre Pilot air trademaster 17L compressor, I purchased a decent HVLP gun that came both a 1.6 and 2mm tip to allow us to spray the paint thick primer with very little overspray, and hopefully a lot less smell than my old suction feed Low pressure gun. The undercoating would be done at home, in small sections to avoid problems with the neighbours (we also contacted the local council to see if they had an issue with it, which they didn’t).

As i have very little experience with spraying paint, i started on the easy and relatively flat panels first, the bonnet and boot lid. I mixed up the epoxy with it’s activator and thinners as per the instructions to make a sanding surfacer, and poured it into the gun. Read entire article.

After my uncertainty of POR15 after the previous incident (see my earlier post), i decided to strip the car back to bare metal and start again with more conventional refinishing products.

Stripping the POR wasn’t as hard as i expected, i bought a 4L tub of POR15′s paint stripper and a few large paint brushes. After brushing the paint stripper onto the car, immediately the paint started to bubble and lift. After 15 minutes or so, i used a metal scraper to scrape off the remaining paint. Unfortunately, there were quite a few areas where new lines of rust had started appearing underneath the POR. The car was then given the obligitory high pressure water wash (yes! on bare metal!) and a quick wipe down, before putting the car away again for another week.

A week later POR’s metal ready was applied to the car. The Metal ready has to be applied and kept wet for a 10 minute period, at which stage the metal is then again washed down with water. After this process the metal takes on a yellow/green/white salted look (presumably what they call a salt and pepper look) and is then ready for paint, this time using an Epoxy primer.

Over the weekend, i got ready to start applying bog to the car, the first step was to rub down the existing coat of POR15 to key the surface. While i was doing it i noticed areas of the paint which seemed to have veins in the paint.

After sanding down those areas, the POR started to lift and crack.. not a good sign

I contacted PPC (the australian Distributor of POR) to see what the deal was, The Car has been garaged since the first coat of POR had been applied (by brush), though the POR had been applied 6 months ago. The original plan was to do the first coat of POR, then do any bog work required before applying the second coat of POR (effectively sealing in the bog)..

PPC sent me back an email saying that basically there were 2 things that could have gone wrong, either moisture (sweat or water) had made it into the paint when applying it, or that because the second coat hadn’t been applied, that microscopic holes may have opened up and allowed moisture to get through.. either way the paint had been compromised, and it all has to come off again..

unfortunately this means having to go and strip the car (again)