But Wait! Before it can be blasted....

Soooo.. called up the blasting company to validate some information prior to dropping the misses off out there.  Turns out, as I had suspected, that the sand blasting process won't do much for removing the undercoating on the car.  Since that stuff is made of a rubber substance, blasting a media at it just kind of bounces off.  Using the required force to remove it can damage the metal.  Here's what I did to get rid of it..











The undercoat is basically a tar like substance that appears to have been sprayed on the underside of most of the car.  This would protect it from rust (mostly), prevent rocks from denting the body (mostly), and act as a sound deadener under the car.  Since this car is 44 years old, a lot of that old undercoating was already falling off.  Attacking sections of it with a scraper seemed to remove a quit a bit of it.  I could just hit it a few times to crack it into pieces then scrape it out.

ewww...

After I did as much as I could with that, I ended hearing that heat could be a good option to remove the rest of it.  I figured why not give that a go. In my opinion, that's really not the best option for this.  I mean, playing with fire is a grand old time, but it makes more of a mess than its worth.    To do this I'd just use my trusty scraper and a torch. The torch would soften the material enough that it'd turn to the consistency of marshmallow fluff.  Then you just had to scrape it off!  Problem is, the bottom of this car has a lot of contours in it, and scraping would only remove so much.

Tools of the trade?

Next step?  Wire wheel on a drill! Yeah buddy!  This was less successful than I'd hoped.  It'd basically act like a low power torch instead of a ripping, tearing awesome tool.  It had to essentially just dig away at the stuff until there was nothing left.. More mess.. YAY!

Finally I had a wave of smarts.  For some reason I'd forgotten (or just assumed it wouldn't work) how I'd removed the same rough kind of material from the inside of the cabin.  Dry Ice!  Now THERE was a fun time.  Chemistry, the sound of stuff cracking, a neat dense fog.. Ahh the memories.  On the way to the shop this afternoon I purchased about 20lbs. of the stuff.  It's really not that expensive.  After the last several attempts I was dubious this would work at all.

It's almost kinda like snow.. really really cold snow

I broke the first bag of it into a bajillion (that's a word folks) pieces with a hammer and poured it all over the bottom of the car.  One of the coolest things about a rotisserie is that the bottom of the car can become the top of the car with very little effort.  I can see why the internet hasn't really caught onto using this stuff to remove undercoat. It'd be a bit of a pain to keep it on the bottom of most cars.





After a while of it sitting that way, I was able to simply hit the undercoat with a hammer and/or my nifty scraper and just pull it off in giant chunks.  Just like the interior!  Man.. That dry ice stuff is something else.  Quite the amazing little secret.

Success!  Most all of the undercoat has been removed.  I still have to clean up a bit of it here and there, but for the most part it's gone!

Battery Tray

No Battery Tray

In addition to that this week, I got a special bit for removing spot welds.  Since the battery in this car will no longer be mounted in the engine compartment I wanted to remove the factory battery bracket.  This is another amazing little invention.  After using a punch to center it on the wells, it just drills them out with very little effort!  So little in fact, it tried to get into the sheet metal under the piece I was removing so I'll have to do some filling and fixing to square that bit away.  I expected that though.





Speaking of filling, I also got a cabinet for my welder and got that thing all setup.  The welder is a Hobart 140.  I only needed a 110v welder as I'm really not planning on welding much more than 18 gauge sheet metal in the floors.  The little guy came with some flex core wire so I can get my learning on prior to getting a gas bottle and starting in on the important stuff.

Shiny!

That's the majority of it this week.  I still need to update the work spreadsheet with some time and materials.  I'll see if I can get to that soon.

Next week I'm going to try to get the undercoat all the way off, then see if I can secure a trailer to get that sucker drug over to someone that can help strip her down.  While it's there I have a guy willing to get me a quote on bodywork and paint.  Here's hoping!