Tag Archives: Paintstripping

I did a whole load more stripping this weekend: It’s surprising how much surface rust there was hiding underneath the paintwork – or maybe not, it is a Speke car after all! Either way, it looks like I caught it just in time. It’s all surface rust, with none of it looking in any danger of rotting through. Given another year or so, it could have been a different story though. Strangely, there seems to be three different types of paint under my car – there’s the normal stuff in body colour (pimento, if you were wondering), which comes off nice and easily. Then there’s some other red paint – this stuff is a darker shade, almost a vermillion colour. This is strange stuff – it doesn’t blister when you put stripper on it like you’d expect, and doesn’t scrape off easily. I found a wire brush was best for … Read More

Got the paint stripping started today. I’m using nitromors at the moment, for no better reason than I had some sitting on a shelf. Start: During: Finish: Check out the rust on top of the wheelarch! It’s just surface rust though, nothing serious – apart from the seatbelt mount. I’ll weld a new plate for the mounting and get some anti-rust treatment on the rest. It’s slow work again, that wheelarch took me two hours! I still have to go over it again around the seams with some wire wool to get the rest of it off. Unfortunately I had to cut it short and go into work – long story, but our server crashed, and now I have to redo all the work I did last Friday. Not happy!

Now I’m mobile again, I got back to the ’7 today. I’ve now got all the underseal off completely, and the underside is now ready for stripping and painting. Finally! The only bits I haven’t done yet are the gearbox tunnel (gearbox is still in the way; I’ll sort that out once I’ve pulled the engine out) and the bits where the axle stands are. Still, seeing as how none of those areas have any underseal, it shouldn’t take long to do them when the time comes. Once I’d finished all that, I was a bit stuck for something to do – I can’t do much more on the underside until I can get hold of some paintstripper and a tarp, that’ll be a job to get started on next weekend. A few weeks (months? Time passes quickly!) ago, I mentioned that I was worried about the windscreen surround. So … Read More

I’ve just spent a few hours over the last two days getting rid of the last of the underseal from the back end of the car. What a disgusting job! I’ve been thinning it out using white spirits, which is pretty effective, but turns it into a sticky, tar-like goop. It got in my hair, all over my hands, up my arms, on my face, down my back, you name it! And once it dries, it’s bloody hard to shift. I’ve just spent 45 minutes in the shower and I still haven’t got it all off. I think I’ll have to hit the shower tomorrow armed with a bottle of white spirits. But that’s all the underseal gone from the rear (up to the rear bulkhead) now – all that remains is to get the welding done, take a wire brush to the surface rust, and then get painting. I’ve … Read More

I’ve now got most of the underseal stripped from under the car, the main problem areas were the wheelarches – the stuff was 1/2 inch thick in places! As I was suspecting, pulling the underseal off revealed a few areas of rust – Some worse than others: Apart from the rear sills and the seatbelt mounting (last picture), this was all hidden neatly behind layers of underseal. So either it was there to start with and just sealed over, these were problem areas that weren’t treated properly when the sealing was done. The fact that the big hole in the wheelarch (Third picture) was covered up on the other side by a patch of fibreglass matting, and the NS sill had a huge lump of filler whacked into it doesn’t fill me with confidence in any previous repairs, though! On the other hand, that’s pretty much it now – at … Read More