| 02-27-2012 |
The last few days have been pretty busy with different things, some of which was being able to work on some of the projects. I have a few pictures from the last few days to add.
I sold my '68 LTD. The guy who bought it was an older guy from Kentucky. He has several cars and said he had a fastback Galaxie the same year and color.
I finally got the air cleaner for my '57 welded together. I had posted previously about the air cleaner I made for a '55 or '56 Chevy. The '57 air cleaners are different so this one will go on my car. Welding this turned out to be a huge headache. The metal was so thin that I could only get good penetration when welding flat surfaces but when it came time to weld two ends together it would simply burn straight through it even on the lowest setting or it would pop and throw slag everywhere and not create a weld. It took a lot of different techniques to finally get it together. I found the best was was to create a small stack of slag and get it heated to liquid by continually hitting it with the wire and then letting it cool until just before it turned back from red. By doing this I was able to melt the pool down and allow it to penetrate without blowing through. This means a lot of extra grinding. Time consuming grinding. There were a lot of holes I had to fill and the entire process took a lot of time and patience, which I was quickly running out of for this side project just to get my '57 going.
Here it is finally welded together as well as it could be and taped off for a first round of body filler.
I had quite a bit of extra filler on the first round. I mixed up a batch of slightly harder than normal, but not brittle, body filler and really pressed it in good to fill in the nooks and crannies that existed in some of the metal. After I sanded that way down I came back with a 2nd, normally mixed layer of body filler and then one more very, very thin layer just to fill the small pinholes. This final layer was essentially completely sanded off except for the small filled pin holes.
While the bondo was drying I started in on getting the rivets out of the leaf spring pads on April's car. There are a total of 4 pads with 4 rivets each. Since April is a math teacher, I know this means I have 16 grueling rivets to get out.
After the bondo dried I peeled away the tape to reveal the edge of the line I wanted to keep. There is an indention in the bottom of the cleaner which I wanted to keep. The other air cleaner doesn't have one and I thought it made this one look much more factory original.
And finally sanded that down
I retaped it to apply the second coat of bondo
And while that body filler hardened I finally got one of the devil rivets out.
Then it was back to sanding. April came out and took a picture of my apparent amazing form.
A friend called while I was sanding. Since we haven't spoken in a pretty good while we talked for a while and as we were talking I took a rag and some compound and then came back over it with some wax just on the top of the rear trunk and on the C pillar just out of curiosity. It actually turned out pretty good considering.
For the first project I had made this formable sanding block. I'm not sure what it is intended for. My step grandfather had it in the garage in a giant roll before we moved in. It had very nasty adhesive on one side. The fact it was in a roll gave it a pretty good contour for what I needed. I first had used two of these I cut as cushions for my vice. This seemed to work about as well as anything else I could have used. I cut my 2nd air cleaner to fit the width of this piece as it was almost exactly the size I needed anyway. I put some tape on the inside and attached sand paper to it. I found when the dust got on my hands they were too slick and I couldn't get the piece to move back and forth so I used some tape on the back side doubled over to give me some traction.
The top of the cleaner had some pitting so I'm also going to have to put a thin coat up there to fill in the holes
And after almost another complete day of sanding the side is finished. I started with 80 grit and ended up with 1200 grit for the sides
Then I put a coat on the top. I got it a little thicker than I wanted but I really wanted to make sure I pressed it down into the little holes.
While that was hardening I went full on attack mode with the remaining 3 rivets on the spring mount on April's car. At long sweet last they finally gave up and I got the best of them
I had to take a punch to the mount to get a couple more completely out. I probably won't use these for years and years but if I ever put this car back original the last thing I want to do is to have to deal with these things again so I went ahead and knocked them out
And after the top was sanded it looked like this
I think this is how the professionals let primer dry
It's not perfect but I think it turned out pretty good.
