Translate

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Cleaning Up the Wheel Wells

All of our wheel wells have vintage undercoating.  This would be old hard and dried undercoating.  I removed large patches with an air chisel but it didn't remove years of dirt and road grim.   I dug out several air tools and I tried all of these discs. 

They worked well but they couldn't get into the nooks and crannies.



This area would have been impossible to clean with a die grinder.

So I decided to sandblast.  It's messy, it's dirty, but I knew it would work.

I like using Quikrete Commercial Grade Medium Sand because the granules are small enough to get through the nozzle yet large enough to do a good job of removing rust and paint.  Play sand doesn't work in my blaster, it plugs up the nozzle.


The results are pretty spectacular.  In fact, this wheel well  is ready to paint.


But this is only 1 wheel well and it took 100 lbs. of sand.  Three more of these are waiting plus the transmission tunnel.
 

Ty, you're missing out on all the fun!

2 comments:

  1. John
    It cleans up extremely well, what kind of finish does the sand leave on the glass does it expose the fibres by removing the resin or is it not that agressive?
    what color are you going to paint as factory was none I believe?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pete,

    The finish is very nice and presents itself as original. I blasted it using 75 lbs of pressure. We may just leave it unpainted if that is how the cars originally came. I need to look at some old production line photographs to confirm. By the way, we got the motor started. Check out the new posting.

    ReplyDelete