What’s up guys.
Well, it’s been a little over a week since primer got shot on the car, and I’m pretty much used to it now. It did take a bit, one, to get used to seeing it in a single color again, and two, to get used to the fact that it’s now a hardtop and not a vinyl roof car anymore!
In the week since, I’ve been slowly working towards finishing off the backsides of my repaired areas. Specifically, where the welds were visible and accessible inside the trunk and behind the driver’s side seatbelt box.
These have been major points that I’ve wanted to get done for a while now. I don’t consider a repair complete until it’s finished out or at least protected on both sides.
In these pics of the driver’s side, you can clearly see the replaced marker light section, and the area just behind the wheel well that was repaired and replaced due to previous damage.
To begin finishing these repairs, I carefully ground the welds flush, taking care to not put much heat into the panels. This was much more challenging than it sounds, I found due to the location of the areas it was nearly impossible to get any of my grinding tools in there. But with a little persistence, I got it done.
These all seem to be of the driver’s side, but I repeated the process for the passenger’s side. The welds ground flush, and the surface prepped:
Once that was done, I gave the welded areas a really quick and dirty skim of putty to fill in any voids that may have been present:
Once that was dry, I sanded the putty with 80 grit paper to knock off the majority of the product. I’m not looking for perfection here, just to fill the voids and level out the surface.
As for the area on the driver’s side lower quarter panel in front of the wheel, it was accessible from behind the seatbelt box. However, try as I might, I was not able to get any of my tools in there to grind the welds flush because of the angle needed to get in there, and the proximity to the inner structure.
Rather than kill myself trying to figure out how to do this, I elected to leave the welds alone and just prep the area for some corrosion protection.
A good cleaning with wax and grease remover before and after scuffing with a red scotchbrite is all it really required:
Now that all the areas were prepared, last night I masked off the areas, mixed up some epoxy primer, and applied it with my touch up gun. I chose to do so as to avoid any brush marks by doing it with a brush:
The epoxy will provide the best method of protecting the insides of the panels from corrosion, and laid down a nice foundation for a top coat.
Tonight, I unmasked the areas, scuffed the now cured epoxy, and remasked after hitting it one last time with the wax and grease remover. With that done, it was time to apply the final finish. The inside of the trunk had been undercoated at some point already, so all I had to do was apply some new product over the repaired areas and blend it off into the existing stuff.
Here they are, now completely done.
What repairs?
I decided to undercoat the area behind the seatbelt box as seen above, even though it had none in there previously. I figured it couldn’t hurt, and will help to seal off the area from any additional moisture that might find its way in there.
I’m quite pleased that these areas are now fully complete, and that there’s nothing further needed to do there. To leave things off for tonight, I figured I’d post up a couple of pics of how the flush mount marker lights are going to look once the car is painted.
Enjoy!
Thanks for looking in on things everyone.
Until next time,
D.
