The Task

This is the task before me. I need to scrape off all of the underbody coating that was such a nightmare to spray on.

Rear Valance

Here you see how much of the material I have squirted into the corners of the rear valance. It should be really tricky trying to get it all out of there! However, note the little bit of blue poking through the coating! That's what I get for not flipping the shell over during the coating process.

Rear Pan

Here is the exterior inner edge of the rear pan. Upper left is the rear wheel well. Lots and lots of coating here! Sure looks good, and I hate to remove it, but it's all gotta go.

11/10/04

I've begun removing the liner from the front wheel well on the passenger side. Getting it out from around the door hinge braces is no fun, I can tell you!

11/10/04- Enough!

I've gotten the forward bulkhead and wheel well cleaned up. Not bad progress for one night.

11/11/04

Wow, things got ugly! This stuff, when it sticks, REALLY sticks! I'm using my trusty wood chisel to remove the coating, but even it has trouble in sections.

11/14/04

I spent a few hours today working on what you see here. I now have about 8 or 9 man-hours into this, and you can see how much I have left ahead of me. I'm finding only about 50% of the coating coming off relatively easily, the rest is a struggle the whole way.

11/21/04 Begins

I received the latest Eastwood catalog, and they had a tool in there designed for removing underbody coatings: A wire cup brush! I decided to give it a try on what was left in the wheel well, and was duly impressed! Deja vu, anyone...?

11/21/04 Ends

And here you see how much work I got done in one night. I found that the cured POR-15 (once exposed with the coating gone) was difficult to remove. However, when I got into the parts still covered by coating and removed them, the POR-15 (not being fully cured) came off much easier! It was messy with dust everywhere, but much less labor-intensive than scraping.

12/4/04

The Carnage. Here is what an hour and a half of grinding gets you: Lots of dust!

12/4/04

The dust is blown away to reveal the small section removed from the rear of the pan, and the half of the tunnel revealed...

12/4/04

Blurry, but you can see what I've removed. I do this, even though it's on the bottom and hard on my knees, because it is much easier to get to now than it will be when it's on top after rotating the shell.

12/11/04- Action

A beautiful weekend for working on the car outdoors! Saturday was just lovely and cool, but Sunday was warmer! Is this really December?

12/11/04

I've gotten quite a bit of it done today. Good progress. If I can put as much time in on Sunday, I should have it almost all bare metal, again!

12/12/04

Just look at all that powder! Grinding the coating off with the wire wheel is really messy. My friend Mike (the one that gave me the 70s pics) came over and gave me a hand...

12/12/04

One of the things that Mike suggested was to use a heat gun to help scrape. Man, that was the ticket! Doing that helped get the coating off MUCH quicker, with less mess and strain. Now I just have a small amount of wire wheeling, and maybe some chemical stripping of the POR-15... Much nicer.

12/19/04

Sweet blubbering babes! I think I'm almost done! The only thing left is to use chemical stripper to remove the last remnants of POR-15 on the pan and in the nooks and crannies, and I can take this baby to the coater for Rhinolining! Life is good (finally)...