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.

Strip Tea Z

Okay, maybe that name is pushing the pun envelope a little too far. So what? I'm gonna push it a little more. Anyway, we're due for an update on the 280ZX project, so here it is.

Let's Strip
C and I increased our focus on the tear down of the donor car over the last few weeks. The seats came out with relative ease and they are sitting in the shedroom (see 280ZX * 2 = Y for an explanation) with the bare-steel front fenders from the keeper Zed. Next, C pulled the center console and radio/climate control console. These were held on with Phillip-head screws and removed fairly easily. Then, C pulled carpets. They don't look like they got much love over the years, but we are going to try to deep-clean them. We thought about just buying a new set for the front, but the newer carpet won't color-match the rear carpets perfectly. Worst case, we buy them anyway. First, we're going to try some cleaning tricks.

Plastic Surgery
Next came the plastic cards that cover the rear 1/2 of the interior. They are all held on with Phillips-head screws and pop-in tabs. Considering that these panels have never been removed, I expected all of the plastic tabs to break off (like they always do on VW's half this age). To my surprise, we only lost one or two tabs. But the plastic cards were filthy. An hour with the hose, soapy water and a scrubby solved that, though. Once dried, the plastic cards joined the growing pile of parts in the shedroom. We also pulled the rear speakerbox which the prior owner (PO) of the keeper Zed chose to remove for weight. Since it weighs less than 2 pounds and provides great utility both as a keeper of 2 plastic bins, but also retains the lines of the car, this decision seems especially dim-witted. No matter. The donor box was in pretty good shape with just a little surface rust around the bottom edge. Another hour of sand-prime-sand-paint, and it's ready to join the other parts in the shedroom.

Screw Holes, but No Screwing
C removed the after-market steering wheel so he could get after the dashboard. The dash should be held on with a handful of screws. As C went looking for them, he found the holes where they should be, but no screws, except for 2. So, the whole dash was held on with 2 screws and tension on the wires and speedometer cable. Zoiks. We removed 2 screws which held the defrost control cover plate to the dashboard from below. Then, we were able to pull the dashboard away enough to slip a hand behind and detach the speedometer cable. The dash then came out as one large piece, with a thick pigtail of wires running out the passenger side. C will need to decide whether he wants to try to get the newer dash components working with in the (slightly) older model or just remove bits down to the covers and swap them. The raw dash has a nearly flawless cover so either way the keeper Zed will be vastly improved by the swap.

We have also pulled the door cards, the wiring harnesses, power door lock motors, and the power window switches and motors from both doors. Since the door glass is so hard to come by, we are keeping those too. We are going to pull the outer scrapers from the doors as well, effectively gutting the doors of anything useful.

Grind Grind Grind
Meanwhile, the grinding on the keeper Zed paint continued with the rear-end almost complete. The rear tail lights are out and C is looking at the rear tail gate as the next, and final, piece to address before we make decisions about swapping in the T-top or restoring the moonroof. When we removed the rear bumper from keeper Zed, we discovered that it was more rust than steel, so we will be sourcing an after-market or salvage one. Unlike the MGB parts I've sourced lately, these Zed parts are hard to find and expensive when you do.

Rim Job
If you followed the Around the Rim saga (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), you already know pretty well what's been going on in this space. I bought a set of mid-90's Honda rims and cleaned them up so I could put the nasty rims that came with the MGB onto the donor Zed. This frees ups the donor Zed rims to put on the keeper Zed; which was the whole reason for getting the donor car in the first place. Once the Honda rims were cleaned up and painted, an afternoon was spent rotating sets from one car to another.

That quick post covers many many hours of work. We are in the home stretch for getting the donor Zed out of our yard, though. I vacillated between keeping and not keeping the transmission, selling the engine or not, etc. In the end, it's just not worth it. I don't have another car to put them into, and I don't have the storage. Besides, someone else can really use them. So, we resolved to posting the car in its mostly-stripped condition, on craiglist. We figured that someone would pay the price of one core charge to get a working engine, transmission and various other parts we didn't need, but are serviceable.

Thanks, as always, for following along. More next time-

MGB - floor pans (Part 2)

Today we continue the saga of replacing the floor pans in the MGB. In Part 1 (See MGB - floor pans Part 1), we identified the issue, and made decisions on parts and a method. Today, we get into removing the old pans.

Get Safe

$15 at Harbor Freight

This could be a euphemism for something else, but in this case, it is exactly what it says: safety first. You are going to be cutting and then welding steel. This throws lots of sparks. Your car runs on gasoline which is designed to explode when a vapor meets a spark. When you put these together, my best advice is to remove the fuel system entirely and then wait a couple of days to let the fumes leave the remaining lines. That's what I did, and I'll post on that later. Consider too, that the cutoff wheel throws dirt and dust everywhere so wear eye protection at least. I use a face shield, long sleeves, and denim pants to protest myself. And yes that gets hot in the summer when you're working in the sun on your driveway.

Clear Your Paths
Under the right (passenger in the US) side floor, there are small pipes and cables that you don't want to set your cutoff wheel into. These pipes and cables are held to the floor underside with nuts and brackets, and further held into place with some rubber bits. Remove the nuts and the brackets and pull the rubber bits out. Toss all of it into a ziplock and mark it as part of the right floor. You'll want them later. Let the cables and pipes hang as far out of the way as possible. Among these is the fuel feed line, the vapor line and the main power supply from the battery. All super important.

blue tape the cut lines

I had the brake and clutch pedals already removed from my efforts on the master cylinders (post on that coming). I chose to remove the accelerator pedal as well to improve my access. Since it is held on with a bolt and the cable is held on with a pin, this removal is very easy. Now that my floor has been removed, I couldn't imagine how much harder this would have been with them still in place. Mental picture: you're lying down on the door frame, hips-to-feet sprawled out through the driver-door, with your arms extended into the foot-well with a grinder spinning a cut-off wheel at 11,000 RPM. Getting the cuts right without accidentally catching the underside of the brake pedal sounds virtually impossible. I highly recommend removing the pedals, if you can.

Mark the Spot
Before you grab your grinder, you need to find the frame sections underneath. On the right (passenger) side, I followed instructions I found online, where I drilled holes at the corners of various support structures. I then connected those dots with blue painters tape and then drew on those lines with a sharpie so I had clear lines to follow. This did work, but for the left (driver in the US) side, I thought I could do it with fewer steps. The first step is the same: with one had under the car and the other resting on the top of the floor, tap with your bottom hand at the corners of the beams. Feel for the tapping with your top hand, and keep circling in on the spot by tapping until you know exactly where the spot is. Mark it with a sharpie. On the right side, I drilled a hole. On the left, I just marked it and moved on. I ultimately found that the drilling was unnecessary. There are 2 main under-floor rails, one runs from the transmission hump to the edge under the front seat mounts. The other runs from that cross rail between the legs to the front. In the US model, imagine a rail running straight at the brake pedal. These rails are about 2 inches wide, but there is only about 1/2" lip that it spot-welded to.

not-so-fun part

Measure Twice, Cut Once
This phrase has been made famous by arm-chair trades-persons dating back to the stone cutters in Egypt. Still, its a good practice. Double check your marked lines to make sure that you didn't draw a line through a section of frame. Also consider if your cut-path will send you through any of the cables or pipes you moved aside earlier. Cutting through a fuel line, even if it's empty, really sucks. Yes, I did and I'll explain how I fixed it later. Along the rear edge, there are two heavier sections in the corners that are not to be cut out. They create structural stability and should only be removed it they are not doing that job. My bar had a pretty rusty floor, but those sections were fine. Make sure your cut lines take these sections into account.

The Fun Part
The floor is cut out in 3 or 4 sections, separated by the frame rails. Cut the rear out first. The rear section comes out as one large, nearly square piece, and the steel cuts pretty quickly once you get started. With the rear cut and pulled out of the way, you can see the cable, etc on the right side. Next, I cut the outer of the two forward sections. Again, this allowed me to avoid the cables, etc on the right (passenger) side. Last, I cut the inner section, and it was all pretty clean except I nicked the fuel line for about an inch, leaving a nice gash in the metal fuel line. At this point, I was glad I'd pulled the fuel tank, and let the system sit for a week or so.

The Bit

spot weld cutter

With the main sections of the floor out of the way, it feels like you're really on your way. That's until you start to understand what comes next. The floor was attached to the rails at the factory with a big spot-welder, placing a weld every inch or so along both rails and around the outer edge. Those spot welds are what is holding that last inch of steel to the car. I have read where some folks (who are far more skilled with a grinder than I) were able to cut these sections off without any other tool. High praise to them. I am no way skilled enough for that, so I went the more labor-intensive route.

Hit Harbor Freight and buy at least 2 spot-weld cutting bits. They are small, fit in your drill, like a regular drill bit, but they are designed to cut spot welds. The shiny, silver point in the center of the bit is set into the center of the weld, and then you run the drill at a slow speed to cut the sheet metal around the weld. This allows the rest of the sheet metal to rise from the rail. Each bit is reverse-able, so as you burn out the teeth, you can pop it into a vice, loosen it with a 1/4" spanner, flip the bit and tighten. One bit lasts twice as long... which still isn't that long if you run your drill too fast.

So, now that you understand the weld-cutter, slap a grinding wheel or wire wheel onto your grinder and grind on the remaining bits of floor so you can find the spot welds. Between rust, paint and black-tar seam-sealer, you may have to grind a bit to find the spot welds. If you can't find them all or you don't want to grind to find them, there is an alternative; you just need to be willing to use a framing hammer and chisel.

The Not-So-Fun Part

cleaned up

With your spot weld cutter in your drill, and a framing hammer / chisel nearby, pick a spot to start. I went with the easiest to get to: the rear section. The spot welds are easier to find back here too. Pick a spot weld, cut it out (slowly on the drill!). If the metal didn't make a "ting" noise while cutting, it may not be completely free. Given time you'll get the hang of it where you're not cutting too deep (through the frame) nor too shallow (and leaving the metal well attached). If the metal didn't separate, get under the metal edge with your chisel and give it a couple of smacks with the hammer. Eventually, the floor and rail will separate. Now do that about 120 times. Per side. I spent about 4 hours per side doing this, so be prepared. Now, I do things slower than lots of people, so maybe you'll be a lot faster.

As you remove flooring, the remnant will start to flop around. On my first (right/passenger) side, I just crumpled the metal out of my way. While this worked, I found that by cutting strips in straight sections (using tin snips) was more effective. And, ff you set them aside with the larger sections of floor you cut out, you can re-create the shape of the floor later.

Clean It Up

temporary protective paint

Once all of the spot-welded in bits of floor have been removed from the rails, you're ready to clean up. First, look at what you've done. There is a pile of twisted sheet metal lying on the ground next to your car. The rails have some holes drilled through (I know mine sure did). The rails have like 100 little circles of flooring still attached, there's some rusty spots, some paint, and probably some seam sealer. All of that needs to be taken down to bare metal for welding. Grab your grinder, put in a good grinding wheel and get after it. To me, this was the most satisfying part of the process to this point: Simply grinding away the ugly and leaving a nice clean shiny rail. Once the weld points are nice and clean, I switched over to a wire wheel and removed all of the surface rust I could find in the foot well, along the transmission tunnel and the rear, effectively grinding away all of the rust in the seating tub.

Since I was not going to be working on the project for a while, I shot the cleaned up space (including the rails) with primer and some orange Rustoleum so I wouldn't have new rust appear while I was away. This meant I got to grind that paint off later, but if you're not going to jump right into welding, I'd encourage you to consider the same.

That's it for today. More next time. Thanks, as always, for following along-

Wrapped in Gray

Over the last several months, I have been trying to get a ton of body work done. List so many things, it didn't look that big when I started. Now, though, its become an ordeal, and Memorial Day is approaching. Preferring not to cut too many corners, I prepped the interior well, but used cheap paint to get 'er done.

Grind, Mama, Grind
In Learning As We Go, I described the state of the steel floors. I won't put sticky-rubber on top of a horizontal steel surface again. I have spent many hours grinding the resulting rust down. I removed all of the interior bits, pulled out all of the McMaster-Carr rubber stuff and set to eliminating all of the rust I could find. There wasn't that much, but I made some discoveries along the way. For example, it looks like there was a brake fluid leak before I owned the bus, and that caused some steel issues behind the driver seat. There are new panels welded in there. Unfortunately, the welds have started to rust, as have the replacement panels, so they got ground down like the main floor did.
I also looked for and found some rust spots that had evolved into small holes on the outside. I ground them out, banged on them with a rubber mallet to shake bits loose and ground some more. Like the floor, I double-coated with NAPA Rust Converter (forcing it inside the holes as well) to stop the cancer from spreading.

Sand, Patch, Sand

Once the rust was gone, everything needs to be sanded. For the unaffected areas, its so the new paint has something to adhere to. Then, I grabbed this stuff called Lab Metal that GratefulEd turned me on to. Its a silver putty that dries and sands like body filler, but actually has aluminum in it. Anyway, I had lots of tiny holes in the interior from different interior configurations, multiple window treatment attempts, etc. The Lab Metal applies very easily with a putty knife, and dries very quickly. Keep the lid on your can, or it will dry out on you. I have added paint thinner to my can to keep it extra thin. I've gone over all of the holes in the bus with that stuff. The little rust holes? Gone. The tiny dent near the radio antennae? Gone. It dusts down with sandpaper and patience. Like any other filler (be it Bondo on your car or Spackle in your house), don't over sand, or it will be concave, nullifying your effort.

Vacuum, Wipe Down
Once the holes were filled, and the Lab Metal sanded down, The entire vehicle has to be vacuumed. This took me back to when I used to paint houses. The basic rule was: if you're going to put paint on it, the end of the shop-vac must go across it. Extending that to also include vacuuming anything that was up against where you were going to paint, I ran the duster end of a shop-vac on every inch of the painted bodywork, inside and out. The only thing I didn't vacuum was the ceiling.
Once vacuumed, every inch needs to be wet-wiped with mineral spirits, In cases where there is more than just dust, the surface must be rubbed clean. Like the vacuum, every inch that will receive paint must be wiped down.

Paint
Finally, after all that, you're ready to paint. There are lots of options, and few of them are very good. There's the internet-rumored $50 paint job using hyper-thinned Rustoleum. I tried it on my pop-top and bumpers. It doesn't take getting bumped very well. You can get rattle-can Rustoleum, but that has the same problem plus you have airborne paint so you have to protect everything you don't want painted. You can get one-stage enamel. While it is probably possible to apply it without a spray rig, it won't be easy, and probably won't look very good. Once you get to this stage, you're looking at someone with some skill shooting it. You may as well go for the 2-stage, multi-coat job and spend a few grand on it. For my interior, I went the completely other way. I cringe as I write it (as you will as you read it), but I got basic Home Depot Behr interior enamel and color matched it to the foam headliner I'm planning to put in.
...pausing for effect...
Then, T and I got into painting overalls and brushed in the interior. It looks fantastic. Today. I know very well that it will not stand up to getting bumped, and I'll scrape something when I put the interior back in. I don't care. It takes me less than 30 minutes to empty it by myself, and I don't mind doing touch-up whenever things get scratched. Total paint cost: <$30. After driving around in a seemingly Dalmation themed interior (white with black rust-treatment spots all over it), gray with scratches is a major improvement.