Painting the Mango
March 14th 2004
so it's been almost three months since I started the project. So far I have managed to strip the paint away and the majority of the rust that was starting to plague the front part of the chassis. the product I am using to paint is POR-15. I am using two different base coats. one base is a thick black that is intended to be used in the engine bay and covers a fair amount of the pits in the metal. The other base I am using is a clear. from a beginner painters experience this is a total pain in the ass because I am not 100% certain it's on to thick or to thin! I did manage to mess up and lay the clear down a little to thick in some areas but that was easily remedied by hitting the pooling area with some low pressure air from the air tank after the coat sat for a hour.
The lungs and brain cells seem to be holding up fine since I have been swapping respirator filters every 8 hours of work. Below are some of the pics I have shot off after the initial coat. I will lay the second coat on in a couple of hours once this coat gets a bit stickier!
March 18th 2004
Two nights (about 4 hours total) of wet sanding and one more good cleaning. I am ready to touch up a few spots with the Por-15 and then start spraying some color hopefully this weekend. I have a few reservations as to spraying into the hard (read VERY HARD) to reach places we will see what I come up with, my fingers are crossed!
March 20th 2004
On the 7th Day Their was PAINT! As the paint dries right now I am astonished how good of job and bad of job I did! the POR-15 sprayed on like molasses and took allot of work to get to where I finally decided to say "Fuck it"! the whole point of tearing all of this down was to keep the engine bay from completely rusting out. So I invoked the Function before fashion rule and decided to spray the final coat today even though I had planned to do dome more wet-sanding and get the basecoat as smooth as possible. The PPG Delstar Acrylic paint sprayed on with the consistency of water and laid down in most of the places I though I would have to get a small airbrush to add the finishing touches.
I decided to pull the lower crossmember off the control arms and suspension parts and take that down to the car wash to remove 32 years of grease and grime. this piece was pretty rusted also so I decided to give it a coat of the POR-15 black, along with the motor mount brackets just so things look a bit cleaner when it's time to install!
A few things I have yet to paint are the Brake booster spacer and the heatshields for the brake master. not to sure what I will do here. maybe just the acrylic to cover up the rust!!
Pics of todays progress to follow soon!
What's left to do? Today I will watch the paint dry. Tomorrow I will start to reassemble. hopefully in the next 2 weeks I will have everything back in so I can work on the wiring harness I smacked with the angle grinder removing paint (more wasted time!!). install alarm and Autronic EFI!!
Time To reinstall everything!