Not much to report this weekend, it is too cold to do what I want to the car so I took my spare wheels in to have the tires removed to free up some space. Two of them I got rid of all-together, kept my 14×7 Cragers – doubt I will use those, but still wanted to hand on to them. Then removed the tires from the 14×7 American Racing rims and also had a bent 14×7 Rally rim repaired. Now that it has been repaired, I am thinking I will have the 14×7 Rally rims on the back and 14×6 Rally rims on the front which means I will need to find 2 14×7 trim rings, otherwise I am good to go. I think I will also keep my 14×7 American Racing rims and alternate between the 2 sets depending on what I am doing. It freed up a LOT of space in my shed! I prefer the old-school wheel wheels rather than the big rim, skinny tire look that a lot of cars have now.
I added a dust reclaimer unit to my blast cabinet so I could strip some of the smaller parts such as the shifter hump patches – the unit was larger than I had imagined:
a before shot:
It worked fairly well, but did have some issues with the gun in the blast cabinet, so ended up manually sanding some of the remaining pieces – ready for primer:
Woodgrain dash bezel – I had one already, but the cigarette lighter hole opening needed work. This one has no issues. I also received a wiper switch for the recessed wipers.
I also had to replace a water trap in my air compressor air line that was leaking air – I plan on using the blast cabinet next weekend and needed to get that resolved ahead of time.
So one more round of welding and grinding. I will have these re-blasted & sprayed with epoxy then use a little filler to smooth out the gaps and call it good.
There was also a small bend I needed to hammer out – before:
After a bit of cussing, I have it pretty much welded-up again. The issue was even though the hole was small, the surrounding metal was pretty thin and kept enlarging the hole as I welded it up. A lot of short blasts and cooling off with air. Hope to grind it down tomorrow, but will not be as picky about how smooth I get it and will coat with some evercoat to seal it up. I used my copper backing plate which considerably helped…
Hope to sand it down tomorrow,..
Also need to replace my water trap in my air line as I detected a leak in it today – more cursing… 🙁
Did a little more grinding of the welds. Broke through in one spot, but the rest looks good. That means at least one more go-around of welding and sanding this weekend.
Broke out the welder today – haven’t used it in a year. Was going to find some scrap metal to practice on first, but couldn’t find the right thickness, so dove right in to the inner fenders, touching-up a couple of spots. Not a single burn-through, so I consider it a success! Next is to re-sand them and hopefully there won’t be any more spots needing touched-up – it gets difficult to spot the areas needing touched-up the more you weld.
