24 May Restoration Station 2 – Electric Boogaloo
Now that’s it’s been a few days, let’s take a look at the next set of steps we took to prepare this Porsche 914 for a restoration.
When we last left the 914, it was hanging out in the paint mixing/buffing area, where the outer hinged panels had been removed, along with the stripping of the doors and the hood and headlights.
From there, we started taking everything out of the trunk and engine bay to prepare them for complete removal, including the entire motor and transmission assembly.
At the same time while the parts removal is taking place on the 914’s body, the other members of the body group are going to town on the doors and hood of the car. A few passes over the paint reveals what we’d thought all along — there had been previous work done on this car, and a fair amount of body filler had been used at that time. We also found a couple small holes underneath the paint, which require just a tiny little patch. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of grinding through the paint back down to the bare metal, which we’ll smooth out and prep for paint.
We also found a little more rust under the body, by one of the floor seams. No matter, we’ll be replacing it with shiny new metal soon enough.
Grinding down yellow paint puts a lot of fine yellow dust into the air, which tends to stick nicely to both human skin and clothing. After a while, it looks like we’ve stepped onto the set of Big Bird’s bukakke debut. So every so often, we have to take some time to sweep up all the dust and get it out of the shop.
While the car was up on the rack near the paint booth, we spent a little time dropping the motor.
And now we’re pretty much up to speed. At this point, we’re going around to each of the rusty areas on the car and grinding the paint down to find the spot welds. Once we find them, we’ll punch ’em out and replacing the offending rusty panels with metal of a much higher quality (read: non-rusty). Jay posed for a picture with the grinder, and normally we’d post it, but this one is just a bit too disturbing. So we’ll keep it under wraps until he does something to tick us off.
Made plans for the 3-day weekend yet? Memorial Day’s almost here!
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