The engine compartment originally was not in too bad of shape. It had some corrosion from where the battery had been. But other than that it just needed cleaning up and repainting. Below is what it looked like after I had blasted most of the grease and gunk off with a high pressure washer.
This is the inside of the left fender after the car had been sitting in my garage for about six months. You can see drippings where I had water sanded the front fenders. The water carried the sanded primer and deposited it on the inside here as it dried.
Near the top left of the picture you can see a section where I replaced a rusted out piece of metal.
Here is the view of the inside of the right fender. You can see the two shock mounts sitting on top. I will paint them separately later.
All the brake lines you see have to be removed before painting.
The area at the top of both shock towers had a lot of ugly looking welding from a previous repair. I did some major grinding to make it look better, but there was a small spot that had not been welded. I took a few minutes to fill it in with my MIG welder and ground it down to look nice. You can see the spot in the picture below at about the 7 o'clock position. You can see the top of the shock sticking up near the center of the hole, and the coil spring in the background.
Originally I figured it would take about an hour to spray the entire engine compartment. The paint used was so thick, it did not come out of the gun in a normal pattern. Instead of having a four or five inch wide spray pattern, I had maybe an inch. This made progress much slower than normal and ended up taking about three hours to paint what you see in the three pictures below.
This is the inside of the left fender after painting. I had masked off the steering gearbox and removed the brake lines. As you can see, it looks a LOT nicer than before.
Here is the right side. The paint I used was a special paint intended for just this type of application. It has phosphoric acid, which eats into the metal and dissolves light rust. It is also very thick so it fills in minor imperfections. But it also made it very difficult to spray. And I had to stop and clean the paint gun halfway through.
Here is the overall view. Quite an improvement, if I may say so myself. The firewall will be painted the color of the car. Someone painted it black at one time, so that will all have to be sanded down before painting.
Next up will be the right quarter panel. All the substructure has been repaired so it should be a simple matter of just welding it on. But then again, nothing on this car has been as simple as it should have, so we will see what sort of gremlins are lurking on this part of the project soon.
I am taking a week off to visit friends and family. But check back in a couple of weeks and I should have a picture or two of those gremlin posted.
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