Woo Hoo,

It's about time you did an update and glad to hear your getting back into it. I think you've had that car alot longer than I've had mine! Can't wait to see the finished product. Will be well worth the wait.

Now get back out to the shed and keep working![:x)]

Chippa

Good to see you have a bit of fire in the old belly again Simon. Love your work. Hope to see some substantial progress in the near future

Thanks guys.

Brief update. The seam welding of the chassis rails and strut tops is just about done. I just need to finish off a few tight areas I haven't been able to get the wire brush into to clean back the paint/sealer/surface rust. I still have the floor pan joins to do, but I'll wait until I've fitted the four link kit, diff tunnel etc. etc. before doing that.

Here's a pic of the shell in its new home:



Section of the driver's side chassis rail:



Underside of driver's side strut top:



Engine bay:



Strut top:



That's it for now. Hopefully more to come after the weekend.

Engine bay stripped:



There's a bit of work to do in the firewall/heater plenum area, but at least I can see what I'm dealing with now.



Mind you, it was a little alarming finding surface rust under the factory paint! Thankfully I had always intended to do a bare metal respray as the previous owner did a really bad job painting it white. This just gives me another reason to do it. Have a look at this:



[:u]

The stiching looks nice and neat. Dont worry about the rust I got it under a 3 yr old paintjob[8~2]

Simon,

what paint stripper did you use? It looks to have cleaned up nicely!

Cheers Anthony.

Hi Anthony,

Long time no see! Mate, the paint stripper was the cheapest tin at Bunnings. I'll grab a name off the label when I get home.

It's pretty potent stuff for an 'off the shelf' product. I started off wearing latex gloves, then doubled them up, and then resorted to heavy dish washing gloves, but it still permiates through and burns like buggery.

It's not a one coat process unfortunately, but I'm dealing with four layers of primer/paint. One decent coat of stripper gets the bulk off, a second coat gets the remainder of the orginal paint and primer off, then a third in select areas just for clean up. it's still time consuming work. It'd be nice to just have the shell bead blasted.

Have a look at PeterM's thread. The stripper he's using looks like nasty stuff, but seems to do a great job.

I just stripped my bonnet today with some bunnings stripper, The goo indeed ate through my dishwashing gloves too. My eyes stung a little too. took me two goes to get it clean. I used a rust converter after on all the surface rust.

Anthony,

The paint stripper I used was 'Diggers'.

Thanks mate!