Paint and Rust Removal

Just a quick post today.   On yesterday's blog, I showed how I'm getting rid of the dents in the body.  The doors and hood are perfect.  The fenders are OK, but will need a little work.  The trunk lid has some rot in the passenger corner.   But to get to the bare metal to do the massaging of dents and rust repair, the paint and surface rust have to go.

I bought one of these "stripper" disc for a 4-1/2" electric angle grinder to see how well it would work.

The car has never been repainted.  And sitting outside for better than 10 years in the Texas rain and sun took its toll.   So to begin the "test" of this stripping method, I started on the trunk lid since it was a small area and would be a good test since it had a combination of paint and surface rust.   Here's the before picture...

After maybe 15 minutes with this little stripping disc, the trunk lid looked like this...

WOW!   I let the disc do the work with adding not much pressure to keep from gouging or removing metal.

Here's a "before" picture of the driver's side of the car.  This photo was taken when I first went to look at the car which happened to be in the storage building that the previous owner kept the car for 12-14 years...

Here is what the rear quarter panel looked like after about 40 minutes with the stripping disc...

...And what the door looked like after another 30 minutes of work...

These discs are not too expensive.  Lowes has them for around $9 each.   I used 1 disc to get all of this stripping done.  I bought 3 more (on sale at Eastwood) and hope I can finish the rest of the body with them.

So if you want to get rid of paint and surface rust, I highly recommend this method.  It's a little labor intensive, but it beats the tar out of the $900 the local "Redi-strip" wanted to soda blast the outside of the body.

I have two free evenings this week--tonight and Thursday.  Yay!  I'm hoping to use at least one of them to make a dent (no pun intended) in finishing the front end sub-structure.   Rain and storms are still in the forecast through the weekend.  If this keeps up, I may start a blog on "how to build an ark".