Bear Metal

Today we celebrate getting every last bit of paint, Bondo, primer and rust off of the 1979 280ZX (Zed) metalwork. It was a bear, but we are full metal all the way around. I know: we all thought I wasn't going to get this done next. I am as surprised as you are.

The Grind

This paint removal started almost 3 years ago, shortly after C acquired the car. He did not like what the prior owner did with the big purple "V" on the hood, stretching onto the rear edges of the fenders and the tops of the doors, covering the mirrors. Rather than just remove that paint, he wanted to bring the entire car all the way down to metal, discover what rust there was and repair it. Since the car is over 40 years old, and many of these old Z's suffer from rust damage, it was the right call to make. By the way, body-filler mates to bare metal consistently, but does not bond to primed metal nearly as well, so for a much better paint-prep, it is best to get to metal wherever you intend to apply filler. 

C used various techniques including airplane paint remover, a belt sander, an electric grinder and an air-powered grinder. With the grinders he used various attachments. Once he lost interest, I got around to finishing the work, using various tools as well: sandpaper, razor-blade scrapers and, of course, the electric grinder.

For those thinking about doing this, I forewarn you... it is extremely time consuming to do it this way. There clearly is a reason why the folks on those MotorTrend television shows (looking at you, Iron Resurrection) have the cars sandblasted before they do anything else to the body. In a few hours, a skilled sandblasting shop can have the bare metal exposed, leaving you just the clean-up of both little missed spots and a ton of sand. Figure, I spent 2 hours finishing one fender alone and it had already been chem-stripped, ground-on and hand-sanded beforehand. Since there is time cleaning up all media that is left in the body cavities, etc, that time needs to factor in, but I still think it's a better use of resources (time and money) to sand-blast. Otherwise, the TV folks would hand-grind: more sparks = better TV. One point that I would like to make about the pictures: those dark spots are where I ground off the last of the paint, so those are just discolorations. For the most part, they are flat; they just look bad in the pictures.

The Sand

Manual grinding (and some media-blasting) only works on the metal parts. On modern cars, and even on Zed, there are non-metal parts that would get destroyed by a sand-blaster. For example, the mirrors and the headlight buckets are plastic. C didn't know the headlight buckets were plastic and hit one of them briefly with the grinder, putting a deep gauge in it. So, for these, I will sandpaper by hand. These are the last pieces I still need to complete as of this writing. But, for these plastic parts, "completing" is simply sanding down so primer and paint can adhere. I will need to use a different product to fill the gauges in the headlight buckets, and that won't matter for the rest of the car, so I'm setting that work aside temporarily.

Temporary Assembly

The grinding was preceded by removing all of the body parts that could be removed: tailgate, fenders, doors and hood. I felt that I needed to make sure the body lined up properly, and everything was where it was supposed to be before I started laying body-filler into the small divots in the metal. So, piece-by-piece, I set them back in place, held in with the fewest fasteners possible to just hold them where they are supposed to be. The bottom edges of the fenders are not yet tied into the frame, so if they look a little off in the pictures, that's why. For a brief period, Zed looks whole, and pure shiny silver metal. Atop that metal I will apply a very thin coat of body filler to eliminate the small imperfections found all over the place on this car. I intend to leave the panels in-place on the car until the bodyfiller has cured and been sanded.

To be fair, this car is in amazing shape, rust-wise, but it has seen 40 years of use, so there are small dings all over it. They will disappear easily. The big dent in the driver fender may be more difficult to disguise, but time and effort will tell. If you recall the pictures from when we first bought this car, the damage on the driver side looks way better, especially when we consider that a complete body-work noob (me) banged the dents out with a framing hammer. Yeesh.

That's it for today. This was really more of a status report than anything else, but after so many months of this car sitting, having the paint off the metal and getting re-assembled for Bondo seemed post-worthy. Thanks, as always, for following along.