Archive for June, 2010

Let the painting begin!

On Saturday, I went to Santa Cruz Auto Parts and picked out a metallic red and metallic silver that I liked. It took me quite a while, and I hope the combo turns out well, as it is hard to tell what it will really look like when looking at little paint chips. The paint was expensive; with primer/base/clear it came to over $800, and I ended up buying some tack cloths, rags and paint prep that ended up pushing it a bit over $1000. Still, that’s a small price to pay for doing the job myself, which has been incredibly labor intensive. I’m sure it would cost at least $3000 to get it done by a professional.

I needed a paint booth, so I converted my carport to be a huge paint booth. I sealed off all the sides with plastic (or a tarp) that was simply stapled to the wood. I needed to have some ventilation, but I was worried about a potentially combustable environment with all the paint fumes. I bought three box fans for about $15 each from Home Depot / Target, and four $5-7 furnace filters. I taped the filters on the outside of two of the fans, and had them blow into the paint booth — these definitely are safe, as the fumes won’t be running over the moving parts of the fan. I taped over one fan’s motor cooling inlet and ran it for a while; it didn’t get hot at all, and I figured the HVLP I was using wouldn’t generate enough concentration of fumes to really be combustable in such a large environment, so I used the third fan (with a filter in front of it) as an exhaust on one side. I also put another filter underneath it as another natural exhaust. The two in one out creates a slight positive pressure in the booth. The exhaust one can be seen on the right in the photo below; it is about shoulder level to remove concentrations in the air at about that level.

Inlet fans (filter is on the outside), sitting on some scrap thing I had:

The HVLP compressor is outside so it is always “breathing” clean air and won’t add to the risk of combusting. For lighting, I bought a $20 shop light from Home Depot that had a cover, and a $10 power cord. I mated them together, and covered all exposed electrical stuff really well with electrical tape, and then doubly make sure the entire box was sealed up with duct tape. The florescent bulbs run really cool, and with the added covering I’m not worried about it causing any sparks and fires. It is mounted on a saw horse so I can drag it around to where I need it:

I strung a wire across the carport and hung all the fenders on it, securing one side with wire and some clamps on the other side to keep them from not moving around too much. It is kind of hokey, and works fine as long as I don’t bump the thing and get it moving too much. I can also push the funder vertical and easily spray the underneath right before the top. During my first coat of primer I discovered overspray was bad, so during the second coat I would alternate spraying fenders, and cover the freshly painted one about 5-10 minutes after I painted it. This is enough time to let the paint flash (ie: solvents dry out), and not be tacky. However, this bit me once as I put the cover on a little too early on one of the fenders that had a particularly heavy coat and it stuck to it. I’ll be sanding that one some more to get the marks out.

The engine lid is hanging off a big latter with some wire, and I can spin it around to paint each side:

I sprayed the first coat on and got a feel for painting the car. This is the first car I’ve ever painted, and I did discover a few little imperfections in my body work, but I’ll probably just not worry about it. I might change my mind during the week and fix it before I do the color coat.

Front view:

Rear view:

I had a great summary of what I did, but again lost the post in uploading (darn slow connection and ecto! I need to switch to Mars Edit…)

Basically: Sanded to 220, tack clothed with Prep All to get rid of any residue and sanding dust, sprayed on the first coat, wet sanded with 400 to get it smoother and fix any “oopses”, and tacked it again, and then sprayed a second coat of primer.

Next weekend: color!

The project is slowly moving along! The front part of the bug was a little rusty and had some of the paint gone from a fuel leak. Here it is all sanded and painted with “Chassis Black” from Eastwood, and the new master cylinder and brake hoses in:

I got a 2″ shortened beam to better fit with the drop spindles, but the steering box wasn’t lining up quite right. I had to grind off the little alignment things on it to get it to fit right, and at first I didn’t think it was going to work. I called the company I bought it from, California Imports, and basically they said you sometimes have to tweak stuff to get it to work. So…I tweaked it to work.

Front disc brakes look awesome, and the front end suspension looks new (half of it is!):

I bought shortened tie rods, but I didn’t buy a shortened sway bar. No problem; I cut it:

Removed two inches and hit it with MIG:

Getting the rear axle nut off was not happening with my wrench. I bought a “torque miester” and it made my own little adapter to not let the wheel spin spin — a steel plate with two holes drilled in it that bolts into two of the tire nut holes. It worked really well and was easy to get the nut off.

I powder coated the new rear disc brake adapter — I bought the “better” one from California Imports and it had a cast iron adapter and pushed the wheel on:

I got new brake hoses (steel and rubber) for everywhere, but didn’t realize I needed a longer one for the disc brakes. I ordered the longer steel hoses, but I didn’t like how they hung out in the free space. I had an extra rubber hose, and it worked perfect with the original steel host length, so I used that:

I still have to get another one for the other side and then bleed the brakes.

The EMPI brakes had some clearance issues both in the rear and the front. The disc rubbed slightly on the rear, and the front looked too close to it on one side. The front I fixed with small washers as spacers; each side needed a slightly different thickness. The rear I had to mill off a slight amount on the brake to get it to not rub on the disc:

The main pan was pretty rusty; I sanded most of the rust out, but it had a lot of pits. It didn’t seem bad enough to replace, and I didn’t want to spend the time replacing it. So, I used some “Rust Encapsulator” from Eastwood to seal in the rust and stop it from doing bad stuff:

I then painted it satin black with more of the ‘chassis black’.

The top was slightly rusty; I used some “Rust Dissolver” from Eastwood and it worked better than I hoped! In the picture below the raw steel was all slightly rusty (like the lower bit that I clearly missed).

…anyways, no electric vehicle work done yet, but I now have a bunch of parts from Evolve Electrics:

Adapter plate
PFC30 charger
DC-DC converter
Wires, shunts, fuses, etc.

The controller, pedal, and water cooling should come in a week or two. The batteries may take up to two months….but i’m hoping they will be here sooner than later.

This weekend I learned how to use Bondo for the first time. Lots of grinding, pounding out dents, spreading and sanding. All the fenders are sanded up to 100 grit and all dents/scratches/nicks are taken out.

I also powder coated my new drop spindles; they were already getting tinges of rust.

I got my first EV part! The WarP 9 motor:

It’ll be a while before it sees any action; mainly because the restoration has barley started, and the batteries will take a while to get here. Once I get my adapter plate I’ll probably hook it up to a 12v battery and test it to make sure things move.

So, it turns out popping the tie rods off was a piece of cake with the right tool:

Once that was done, it was quick work to take the rest off in the evening and drop the front end:

I’ll probably paint the undercarriage before I install the new one; hopefully I’ll get the “chassis black” paint from Eastwood auto in a day or too, and spray it this weekend. I’m not sure if I need to paint the spindles or not.

Back in April I bought a Anilam Wizard 411 DRO (Digital Read Out). My old one broke when Jason accidentally moved the X-axis too far (which was totally my fault — I should have checked the stops and made sure it wouldn’t happen). It wasn’t all that bad, as it gave me a reason to add the Z axis for the knee. So, I was about to buy the Grizzly 3 axis DRO (literally had it ordered) when I got a 20% off email from ENCO. That made the totally sweet Anilam almost the same price, so I cancelled the order and bought the nice one from ENCO.

I setup the X and Y a long time ago, but I finally got around to doing the Z. I needed to mill a little spacer block for it, and get some new longer screws. Now it is all together and works GREAT!

The bumper mounts started out slightly rusty and really dirty:

I started a bunch of grinding with 60/80 grit sanding discs on the 4 1/2″ angle grinder. I then sanded it with 150 on a square random orbital electric hand sander to get some of the big scratches off, and manually sanded some of the other bits I couldn’t get with machines.

Then, after 25 minutes in the oven, it comes out powder coated and looking like new:

Total number of parts restored on the bug: 2.