I thought I'd talk a bit about 'the restoration of the engine compartment, as it is one of the problems is a lot of car restoration projects, the first thing you notice as a rule, is the engine room so full of fat and, of course, an engine so the first thing you do, pull out the engine of the car, it is much easier to pull the gear with the engine, and pull as a unit.
You'll notice if you do, that there is athen thought very oily, but now you can at least be sufficient to clean it before I would a steam cleaner to get it, and to see how fat and out a lot of years of dirt road, he wants this, and I do not think that this fast if see that the steam cleaner is not always the dirt from the engine room, go ahead and put a little 'grease on the areas that do not meet expectations, and enter the degreaser for about 30 minutes to loosen dirt.
Afterwhich, you guessed it, he returned to the steam cleaning, which are not received one, scraping, so be prepared, dirt, now gives more dirt and grime of the road that the steam cleaner will not be removed unless the person's car properties, was first varied in love with his car clean, and regularly the engine room, this will without doubt a big difference, you have to do to have it cleaned as soon as you go through scarping all the dirt away, can you stopsSteam cleaner again, and one last shot.
Then you need to take some acetone or something and your final tuning of the engine compartment is known, is clean, if you do not see no more black stuff as soon as it is now time to determine, which are mounted in engine compartment before they can begin preparing for the paint, to search for rust or dents that need to be resolved, you will know from rust, rust appearswill show as bubbles in the paint, holes in the paint, or just big, ugly holes, now if you have some bubbles in the paint you see in the engine compartment, just scrape the top of them, and then see how bad the rust is "light" by touching the rusted with a hammer when the hammer to choose a hole in you engine bay, you know that the rust was at an advanced stage, and must be resolved before going any further on the project.
To fix that hole rust, orForum of rust, you must determine how big the area is done, and I suggest you draw a line around the area, after that you must be sure to have a die grinder with a blade width of cut is installed, what to do now insert die grinder air supply, and then follow the line drawn around the area rusted, and cut a favor and make it a little at a time, one step over the line you drew, just to get a guide for the instrumentgrinder, all you'll be doing here is passing your die grinder over the guide lines that you created until the rusted area is cut out of the engine compartment, now you should de-bur the area that you cut out.
After you get the area all cleaned up, take some two inch masking tape and put it across the hole, and then take a sharpie and follow the outline of the hole, pull it off of the hole and put it on the piece of sheet metal that your going to use to fix the hole in your engine compartment, take your die grinder and work around the line until you've cut out a piece of metal in the shape of the rust hole in your engine compartment, by now you can see where I'm going with this whole idea, OK now take that piece of metal and fit it in the hole in your engine compartment, now that you've got it all fit in place, it's time to find a way to make it stay there while you weld it in, I usually use Visegrips to do this, but how you hold it in place is all up to you, you will want to make sure that it sits in place as level as possible, it will be a lot less work to finish the job if you do this, when you begin to weld the plate in place, your not going to run a solid bead around it all at one time, it will be a solid bead in the end, but work from one side to the other, and do about a one inch weld at a time, otherwise you'll warp the metal, and cause a lot more work for yourself , so when you start, you'll have a one inch inch bead on all four sides holding the metal in place.
Once you have made a solid weld bead around the entire patch panel, you can once again get your die grinder out, and this time put a grinding blade on it, and grind the wed bead flat, once the is done, take a dual action sander, or "DA" and put some 180 grit sand paper on it, and smooth out the rough areas in the paint, that the die grinder made, and the rough up the bare area again with some 80 grit paper, after that is done get out your mixing board, and metal glaze and mix up some metal glaze and spread it over the patched area, and then sand it with 80 grit paper on a hand block, and if needed, repeat this process again until the area is smooth and just a little high, and then load that block with 180 grit paper and level out the high spot.
Now you'll need to primer the area that you just repaired, I would use a urethane primer for this, the brand is up to you, depending on the brand, mixing instructions will change, so be sure to ask you paint supply house to explain to you how to mix the brand that you choose, the one thing that doesn't change in the flash time between coats, this should be about 15-20 minutes, and you should lay at least 3-4 medium wet coats of primer on the repaired area, after you get this done, you'll want to spray a guide coat on the primer, so when you begin to sand the primer, you can see that high or low spots in your repair work, and usually you'll have one, the other, or both, now that you have your guide coat on the primer, and the primer has had time to dry, I would give it no less then four hours to dry, but even better yet 12-24 hours of dry time. Now that it's dry, load that hand block with 180 grit paper and sand the guide coat off, you'll notice that their are high or low spots in your work, you'll need to determine if primer will fill it, or if you need more glaze to be applied to your work area.
For now let's say that your work was smooth and right the first time, so now your done fixing the rusted area, you'll need to get a a bucket and put some warm water in it, and this will be your wet sanding bucket, and a water spray bottle is nice to have also, now you'll need 600 grit wet sand paper to sand you engine compartment, this is of course if the rest of the engine compartment is free of dent, dings, and nicks in the paint, once you know that it is you can sand the entire engine compartment with wet 600 grit sand paper, and the areas that you can't reach wit that, you can use a gray scotch brite pad, once the entire engine compartment is dull, you can then use a prep cleaning solvent to clean it up, and make sure that you get all of the residue from wet sanding out of the engine compartment.
Your now ready to spay the paint, after you mask the rest of the car off, so you don't get paint where you don't want it.
Well cover that painting of the engine compartment in the next article.
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