Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Week 4

January 3rd 2012:
I didn't do an update for week 3 since I didn't really do much with the car until this week. Was working on a friends 1986 Subaru XT Turbo.


Since the car is up and running good. I had it parked under my porch to keep it dry until I was ready to address the minor rust along bottom edge of the car. There where a couple of rust holes bend the driver side fenders, and on the back side of the rear passenger wheel well. After grinding out the rust and treating it with rust dissolver and saturating the inside of the panel with rust eating primer sealer. I filled up the big holes with some expanding foam and shaped it to the proper curves. Then I put on several coats of Truck Bed Liner spray. I did all the rocker panels and up to the bottom body line of the car for looks and protection. One of the bottom chrome strips was missing, so I took the other side off. Filled all the holes and put the Bed Liner all along the bottom after addressing any rust issues. This should form a nice long term rust deterrent.

Filled the rust holes with expanding foam after spraying the inside with ample rust eating primer. This section is hidden behind the fender so it only needs to be water tight and nothing else. Otherwise I would have welded steel plate over it.




Then tonight I decided to put a little more work into the hood. I really don't want to afford a new hood so I had all the stuff on hand to pull the dents and body fill the imperfections. I decided to use a slide hammer to pull the dents, but I didn't want to drill holes in the hood that I would have to weld shut. So instead I welded steel washers to the hood for my dent puller hook. For the major dent it took about 8 weld spots to get it to the right shape. I used a heat gun to heat the metal at the creases before I hammered them to get a bit better shape with fewer welds. For the passenger side of the hood where the welding ground is clamped too, I simply cut the support behind the hood and used a hammer and dolly to level out. On the center of the hood this wasn't really an option because the hood latch was located behind this and I didn't want any alignment issues after re-welding it. This process took about 3 hours up to the point of putting first layer of body filler down and spraying on some high build primer to the right part of the hood to begin leveling out imperfections.







Oh yes, the ratchet strap... The hood wasn't quite setting down as far as it should due the that big center dent. I couldn't put enough pressure on each side of the hood to get it to fold down. So I came up with the ratchet strap idea to put the curve back into the hood. It came down a bit, but not enough so this is my second pull. I left it like this for the night for my body filler to dry. Hopefully I don't crack my filler by doing both steps at once lol.

Finally... The person behind the glass:


All the work I did today was after I had driven all over town with it. I put $15 in gas and drove probably 50-60 miles and my gas needle moved about an 8th of a tank. In my 2011 STi just futzing around it would have been $30 and the needle would have moved about the same lol. In total I spent probably about 5 hours working on the car today. I spent about an hour of that polishing the driver side of the car since I hadn't cut the oxidation off that side yet.