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Monday, May 25, 2009

Paint Removal & Body Prep

I spent lots of evenings and a couple weekends removing the old paint. I tried paint remover, sand paper, sanding discs for the dual action sander, heavy duty scotch brite wheels, sand paper flapper wheels and the FEIN Multimaster (the oscillating tool seen on TV). The FEIN was the best tool for removing the paint. It was recommended to me by Dennis S. so I bought one and found it to be the coolest tool I own. Excellent recommendation Dennis. Thanks.
These are pretty high resolution pictures so feel free to double click on them and check out the condition of the car. It has a little nose damage and a little tail damage but nothing major.
Fiberglass matting and resin are on order. All areas that have exposed fiberglass threads will receive liberal amounts of epoxy resin then the excess will be squeegeed off. Some areas will require additional treatment with fiberglass matt and resin. When all is complete the car will receive a couple gallons of spray gel coat. This will occur months from now.
A little bump to the nose but overall it's not bad. There are suppose to be bonding strips that go on the inside of the front wheel wells where the seam is located. The original bonding strips were probably cut when the front wheel flares were removed. Instead of patching what's left of the existing bonding strips, new, full length, bonding strips will be installed. They're on order and should arrive this week from Eckler's.

1975 350 Engine - Bummer

This is the 1975 L82 350 4 Bolt Main (379010) that was part of the original purchase. It has issues. I pulled the plugs this weekend and water came out of 3 cylinders. So I opened her up to see the extent of the damage. It wasn't very pretty. Everything will require rebuilding. The good news is 1) this isn't the engine that I was going to put in the Corvette and 2) I am not the one that has to rebuild it. :0)
Pretty ugly. I had thought of putting this engine in the 57 Nomad but those thoughts are gone.
The heads had a brand new rebuild done on them about 10 years ago and were never run. These are castings 333882.
I vacuumed up all the water, drained the oil pan (it had water too), dried everything, sprayed everything with PB Blaster then reassembled the motor. It actually looked pretty good when I was done. None the less, someone else can have fun rebuilding this motor. I'll probably put it on Craig's list.