Sand A Car

With the metal work done, it's time to get dirty and prep for body work.

First things first - I emptied out the car.  There's basically a whole car in this pile...

Well, aside from the actual car, that is.

This isn't terribly exciting work.  I really only want to point out a couple things that annoyed me, like the grade of paint that was used to repaint most of the car.  It's gross.  Maybe it's just old, but it's clumpy and difficult to sand through.  Here's an example.  At least there was only one more layer of primer and paint (in the original color), so it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  That doesn't make it any easier.

I went down to bare metal in this spot because of some gouges.  But you can see the original primer, then paint, then new primer, then paint.  The original paint sands nicely but the newer stuff does not.  So it's all coming off, even if I just go down to the upper layer of primer.

It was also apparent that the car was not disassembled prior to this paint work...

After a couple of hours, I got this far on the bonnet.  You can clearly see the difference.

Maybe they laid down a few more coats on the bonnet. The rest of the car actually sanded down more quickly.  Or maybe I just got better at it.

I did burn off the stripes on the passenger's side (well, heated them up a lot, and they got kinda blackened).  A bonus was that the paint came off too, in strips.  The primer underneath is perfectly fine, so it stays.

I had previously removed a lot of paint during metal work, so this went rather quickly.  It's not bad even if it looks ugly.

Then I found some more you-know-what on the deck lid...

It's pretty thin and in reasonably good shape, so it will stay.

I also found an interesting bit of work on the driver's side rear wing.  If I hadn't sanded this down, I would not have known.

It is actually well done.  It appears the entire wing was replaced.  I don't have any records of this from a shop.  The filler is in good shape as well, and the profile is as good as I could do... so aside from a couple of touchups, it stays too.  It's not thick (and after some block sanding, it's thinner than before) - maybe 1/16" or so.  That's within my 'tolerance'.

So I got through about 2/3 of the car in one day of about 8 hours of sanding with about 10 40 grit DA discs and two enforced breaks to let my compressor cool down and to play a few games of Rummikub with may father in law.  I figure another 6 hours will do it, including the boot lid.  Then it's into the nooks and crannies to make things look decent where you don't normally look, and then I can start with filler.

I don't think it will take all that long.  (I am sure I will eat those words.)