Red Bull – One Man And His Mustang

A trip to see the guys at Mustang Maniac on Saturday was filled with a little bit of fear. I knew what was coming and last week I hurt when I got home. But, I felt pleased with the progress although it seems slow while you are doing it. This time there was much more of the area to clean and what was to come of was more of the tar, under seal, paint and what ever else they piled on it. The newer paint is a lot harder to strip back due to the advances in the process I guess. The work was hard and painfully slow all day or so it seemed, but when you pack up to go home, look back at the car there is lots that has actually been done. I even had Adam tell me that now I was a “volunteer apprentice” (I’m proud of that title), no using electrical tools as that was cheating! We did get to use them later on though for a few test areas after we saw bare metal. During the day, I had an interesting experience should we say. Although I am working in a very, very well ventilated area, in fact the wall is a massive full sized steel door, when opened the sun floods in and natural light helps with what you are doing, I even had a mask on too. I was using thinners earlier to clean up a section and decided to take a short break. The thinner fumes had obviously impregnated my clothes and the can of Red Bull that I decided to drink, certainly gave me wings should I say. Now I know how Pink Floyd came up with those songs they did should we say. A quick wander around to the other work shops to see what the dogs were up too and take in some fresh air soon brought me down again, I seriously don’t recommend that one! Next time I think it will be just water to drink. Anyway, I came home in the evening and I was hurting again, poor ol’ me, but with a massive smile. The results are amazing I must say on the car and I’m pleased again with the amount of work that got done when I look back at the pictures. Adam joined me later in the day and he did get some tools out to see what was under the rust. We found a couple of issues but nothing to horrendous, some good old filler had been used on a chassis rail so a section of that rear rail will need a new section welded in. The previous welding has a lot to be desired and we will take some of it off and put back in some proper welding. Tip, never give your classic car to a bloke who can’t weld!

top part where the panel was loose

bottom section holes

Adam doing a test patch

old floor supports and pan

Once we had bare metal we needed to protect the metal so a spray of Gibbs Brand was used and she will not rust up again now. In fact she looks almost new underneath now. Apart for the suspect welding that can be seen on the top chassis rail, and the bottom floor pan section. Next week I hope to move to the engine bay and fire wall for a strip down. I am developing a better technique each time I start using the stuff I am pleased to say.

I woke up today with arms that felt like they belonged to an orang-utan. As I was allowed to go and “play cars” all day yesterday I did promise that I would help the wife in the garden today. I had to put up a trellis, but the trellis was on its own to create a patrician. So I had to dig three deep holes for the posts to hold them up. So here I am having trouble holding the mouse let alone typing. The aches will pass for sure and I will be ready to go again next weekend. I even tried the sympathy vote on wife, I got “the look” and carried on digging. The trellis does look good, but right now – I hate it!

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The weekend couldn’t come quick enough for me and seemed such a long week until it finally arrived. Saturday I woke with a feeling of knowing exactly what I wanted to do, but I didn’t really want to do it. It was going to be messy, it was going to hurt and it would never be seen. But that is the nature of restoration that I have learned so very quickly. The job in question was removing Waxoyl from inside the car roof. As you may or may not know, I had fun and games removing it from the floor pans before I treated them with POR15 paint. This time it was above me and I wasn’t too sure how I was going to attack it. Red Bull drinks were lined up and snacks were lined up like little toy soldiers on my Blue Point work cart, I knew what was coming. Plan A; was to rub the wax off with a bunch of rags and degreasant, I tried but I only seemed to spread it about and not remove it fully. Plan B; drink Red Bull and find a scraper while eating a snack. This gave the poor ol’ bloke arm muscles time to recover from half an hour of what seemed like somebody setting fire to them, they were burning that much. The man cave has lots of things that I have stored, (not hoarded – Stored) to choose from. I found all sorts of flexible implements that I could try and felt rather pleased with myself walking back to the garage. Trials were undertaken for the best tool. First was a plastic separator for a tool compartment – that was too soft, but would make an excellent filler spreader tool. (Note made to self at this point, for a small spreader use this bit of plastic). Secondly I had a silicon sealer remover, this was OK but too small and hurt the hands due to the funny angles on it. Thirdly I had a pallet knife that was good but again to small and too stiff and dug into the metal on more pronounced curves as it was sharp. The winner was an old filling knife I used for decorating, it was flexible and formed to the very slight curves of the roof, it didn’t dig into the metal and scraped of a good amount each time.

I started from the back to the front and the flex of the blade followed the roof well. The whole process was messy as the skin grafts of wax were raining down on me and went everywhere. At the start of the work you can see the roof under the wax which wasn’t pretty but it worried me a bit as it looked rust coloured, so I wanted to protect it best the best way possible. I took a photo of half the roof done for a comparison with and without the Waxoyl to show what it was hiding.

untouched roof

The mess was unbelievable and the old towels I had put down were not enough to cope with the mess. The side pillars at the rear were also cleaned up but were going to get a slightly different process. Snacks were consumed and a fair amount of water taken into the system. Arms are now aching beyond belief.

half way done

mess

more mess

even more mess

left side pillar

right side pillar

Once the roof was stripped of the wax I had to degrease it with the strongest mixture of POR Marine Clean I could mix up on 1:1 basis. This cut through the grease and left a very clean surface after a couple of treatments. this was left to dry thoroughly.

I used a full tin of Rust Prevention paint (picture on the process page, or click here) as this time as there was no real rust to be fair. The paint required two thin coats within ten minutes of each other. They looked a little patchy when drying but the end results was amazingly smooth and consistent to a whitish grey in colour.

single coat

second coat

almost dried

The side pillars were a different story as the bottoms by the shelf was rusted a little more and need some treatment of the Granville Rust Cure. Once that had dried off too I used some Eastwoods Rust Encapsulator to spray behind the pillars into all the little gaps then sprayed the outside all the way down to the window winder area. The satin black cuts the light down in the car again. Around the roof where the inner rail is there was not enough prevention spray for all of it. So I decided to Eastwood those areas too, while trying to prevent a little over spray not that it would ever matter of course. Another note to self; start on the rear shelf soon.

left side

back

The end result looks quite good due to a contrast of the black and white, the down side is once the head liner goes in – Nobody will ever see it and nobody will ever know!