Media blasting

On a chilly Tuesday morning the flatbed arrived to transport the chassis, rotisserie and all, to a local paint shop for media blasting and priming.

Here’s what it looked like an hour later when it was rolled off the flatbed in the parking lot of the shop.

Here’s what it looked like 3 days later when the media blasting was complete.

There’s still a fair amount of paint on the quarter panels, sail panels, and roof. All of that was intentional left in place due to those panels being very straight and the chance of rust in those areas being very low, so the shop opted to sand those panels down by hand before priming rather than blasting them in order to avoid un-doing any previous bodywork there.

The damage to around the battery tray is even more evident now, a large portion of that area will need to be cut out and replaced.

A closer shot of the battery tray area.

The rest of the engine bay showed no surprises, here’s a shot looking from the front of the engine bay back to the firewall.

Cowl damage was expected as well as they’re known problem spots for these cars. Here’s the worst of the damage on the driver’s side of the cowl.

The floor came out looking better than I had anticipated. There was a fair amount of surface rust and I was concerned that more of the floor pan and transmission tunnel would be compromised.

There are definitely spots that will need work, potentially even full replacement of a couple footwells, but the transmission tunnel came through just fine so I no longer believe a full floor replacement will be necessary.

The area where the metal under the rear seat meets the wheel wells has a fair amount of damage on both sides, the passenger side being the worst of the two.

The blasting revealed the the passenger side quarter panel was reskinned at some point in the past.

Some body filler was exposed on the rear taillight panel but nothing too egregious.

A shot looking up from underneath the passenger taillight showing damage to the edge of the trunk pan and a little at the rear of the quarter panel and wheel well junction.

The trunk came out looking like swiss cheese, as expected.

Of the body panels that I dropped off along with the chassis the shop chose to only blast the inside rim of the trunk lid due to common rust issues along the rear lip.

Turns out they were right, though the damage wasn’t particularly bad.

Over the next week or two the shop will finish up the job by hand and then throw a coat of epoxy primer on everything, then it will all be headed back into the garage where the metal work to repair all of the rust damage will begin.