Trunk update

Cleaning up of the trunk has officially started now! :-)

I've started to remove old body sealant in places with rust. Most rust is on the rear left side. This is around the wheel well.

Also underneath the left taillight there's some rust. I have yet to find out how to get rid of the rust in hard to reach spots...

I couldn't do too much today because the batery of my drill was empty and so was the second battery, grrrrrr.

Project trunk has started

My trunk is rusty. 90% of this rust started after some twats from the winter-parking put it outside in the rain eventhough I asked them not to. When I picked up my car the outside was dry but there was a small puddle in the trunk and I only discovered so after I drove to the current parking. Crap!

So today I started preparing the trunk for sanding and painting. But I also wanna know what these wires are for:

?

This is what the trunk looks like right now. Too much rust...

It's still surface rust so I should be able to sand it away and paint over it.

Behind the filler-neck.

There is this soft, white, rubbery substance in the corners everywhere. I don't know what this is...

My paint also arrived today. In convenient spray-cans :-)

Removing rust and more (unfinished) painting

On a 40 year old car there's always some rust, especially if some of the previous owners did a bad paint job. Here are some of the results:

Several rust spots on the back pass. side fender:

A crack in the paint left of the trunk-lid:

Rust along the edge of the trunk-lid.

Not very cool and it only gets worse so lets just get some paint on there before it gets too bad. I know I can never get the same colour so I just used the closest match which is the paint I also used on the front bumper. One day this car will be repainted anyway. It can be a sleeper until then ;-)

I found this cool blue flexible tape and I just taped away...

Then I put newspaper around the spots to be painted:

Just in time I discovered this new sanding-disc from 3M. Awesome! This would have cost me an hour of sanding with normal sandpaper. Now it only took 10 minutes:

Then I put on more anti-rust primer. This one will actually stop existing rust as well. But I sanded away every bit I could find.

BAD SURPRISE! When I removed the blue tape, it tore away loads of paint. I was not happy!

I decided to remove all the blue tape before continuing and tape with normal painter's tape instead.

Then I started spraying the first white coats:

These spots too a bit longer because I kept sanding off too much... But eventually I put on white here as well ;-)

Nice!

The colour difference is quite significant unfortunately. I guess the car will have a few white spots the coming years...

I taped off the bottom black decal stripe and put a few layers across the full width of the trunk so you don't notice the colour difference on the trunk at all:

It's a good solid layer of paint everywhere. Now the edges need to be sanded away still. And maybe a few layers of clear varnish.

But I think I'm going to start with removing the LPG first soon...

Taking out the taillight

I spotted rust around the taillights and I want to fix it. I thought this would be a easy fun job. Little did I know...

I took the back of the light off first. This was a bit stuck as well. No idea if that's supposed to be stuck or glued or whatever...

The rubber gasket that sits between the metal and the light was stuck to everything. It took me 30 minutes of gentle pushing and poking before the actual light let go. You wanna be careful and not push too hard or it might break...

The gasket was old and stuck.

Stuck everywhere but particularly in spots with rust.

I pulled it out but some rust was pulled out along with it. I wasn't expecting the rust to be this bad. The gasket itself is in bad shape as well. I need new ones...

You couldn't see this from the outside. Underneath the gasket there was a lot of rust. When I removed the gasket, it pulled out rust along with it and now the edge of the hole that the taillight sits in is pretty screwed...

Well, I wanted a project car, I got one now! ;-)

TO BE CONTINUED!