June 26th, 2009

My time in South Florida has ended! I am now back in the Sanford area full time! I now have plenty of time, in between looking for a job, to play my favorite truck-related game- Just How Bad Is It, Anyway?

Okay, so it was Friday afternoon, my girlfriend was going to be tied up several hours in the evening, and I'd had enough housecleaning to last me a while. So I decided to go after my truck with my wire brush.

I started on the passenger side door. Yes, that disgusting orange thing off the parts truck that was partially spraypainted a distant blue with wirewheel marks on the window. The surface featured, among the traditional surface rust, this amazing textured paint job. It appears that someone in that trucks past had applied a paint incompatible to what was already there, or simply decided that sanding was unnecessary before painting. If the surface already looked like that, then I guess I can see where anything would have been an improvement, sanding or no.

I started just behind the window and brushed down a small spot, then moved below the window to some particularly grievous looking surface rust. And so, "Just How Bad Was It?" Surprisingly, not bad. I was actually able to expose bare metal easily enough, and the offending mostly orange paint gave way to smooth steel underneath. Even the surface rust had only minimally pitted the surface.

Encouraged by these results, I covered up the bare metal I had uncovered with sanding primer to protect it from rusting, and moved on to the rear corner of the hood on the passenger side. There were some rust holes visible and the surface was bubbling, a classic indication of a poorly done repair job. After some liberal application of the wire wheel, I uncovered the ugly truth. So, "How bad was it, Anyway?" The original rust hole had formed where two pieces of metal joined and were spot welded. This created a water trap, and both pieces rusted through. Our would-be restorer (recall that this hood came from a different parts truck) filled up the holes with fiberglass and smoothed it over. After some time, no less than ten years, rust started bubbling up the paint and glass and it became obvious that a better repair job was in order. I also covered this up with sanding primer and left it for later, when I really start in on the hood and weld in some new metal.

Quit while I'm ahead? Never! I moved onto another spot, this one on top of the hood on the drivers side. Now this one looked easy. It looks like a dent had been repaired at one time, but the fiberglass had bubbled and popped away from the center, leaving a hole about 6" long and 3" wide, revealing the metal underneath, which featured some surface rust. No problem, right? Simply remove the fiberglass back to metal, remove the rust, and bang out the dent. "Just How Bad Was It?" Well, getting back to the norm, the answer with this spot was the usual "worse than I thought." I chipped back some of the Bondo with a screwdriver and started attacking the rest with the wire wheel. As it turned out, it was more than a simple dent- it was a scratch that ran almost the whole length of the hood. The cracked out part was just the deepest part. I took out the Bondo forward of there I started and some backward. I removed as much surface rust as I could with the wire wheel (which was starting to look pretty sad at this point) and treated the area with this rust converter stuff. Available at many auto parts stores, this his chemical converts iron oxide to "iron chromo-phosphate" and leaves a sealed surface. I'll get back with you on how it works. I covered this too with primer to ward off rust and that was a day.