Cleaning up the body

At this point, all the mechanical stuff was pretty well in place, and the next job was to attack the body panels, clean them back to bare metal and paint them.

I did most of the cleanup with a wire wheel on the angle grinder, although there’s a couple of pictures where we tried sand-blasting.

Sand-blasting wasn’t very successful, I have to say. It worked ok at first, but then we started to get water coming through the line which blocked the sand pickup. Partly this was because it was a very humid day i.e. it had been raining heavily, and the water filter wasn’t coping.

As well as this, I had hired a petrol compressor rated at 15 cfm, and it was really only just able to provide enough air for blasting.

In the end we gave up, and I used a couple of coats of paint stripper, followed by the wire brush on the angle grinder.

I’ve tried sand-blasting a couple of times now, and I’ve decided that without a commercial size compressor (read 3-phase power and lots of oomph) it isn’t worth messing about with.