A blog about finding and keeping my 1973 Mustang Grande (V8 - 351C 2V). Produced on July 6, 1973. Sold in Florida, USA.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

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...