I got a little more progress to post. The engine is about together and waiting for a spot to rest permanently. I stripped most everything from the engine bay to get it ready to paint. It really wasn't all that bad, but had a few rust spots that needed to get cleaned up. I pulled the steering rack, and hydraulic assist brake booster. I've decided that I'm going to go with vacuum assist brakes since my hydraulic booster was leaking and I really didn't want to take the time to rebuild it.
Most everything pulled out of the bay and spend quite a bit of time cleaning it up with brake cleaner. I found that you can buy it in a gallon jug instead of just the spray cans. I works real good on the grime and old audi undercoating, but my oh my does it get you floating after a few hours of brushing and wiping.
Pulled the blower housing, speedometer cable, and windshield wiper assemble out of the tray to clean it up and repair a leak where some of the goop had cracked and let water into the dash area around the fuse box. I just used a brush on seam sealer for this repair.
Wire brushed the rust spots under the steering rack and a few other places to get down to bare metal and be able to cover with seam seal.
Washed with water, comet cleaner and a scotch brite pad to get the oils and grime that were still on from the brake cleaner job. This not only gets the oils off, but lightly scuffs the gloss off the paint for good adhesion for the new paint.
Taped everything off. Notice the brace from the passenger side strut tower to the firewall is still there, but without the coil bracket on top. Its not the prettiest brace, but I think I can use it for coil mounting or something else and it won't be in the way much. I hope anyway.
And painted early this morning. I was trying to find a time where it wasn't so hot and humid. It's been raining for the last few days and although the temps have dropped to the low 100s to mid 90s in the day, it's been about 60% humidity and those kind of numbers don't do well with painting. This morning it was about 80 and 40% humidity, so I went for it.
It turned out decent for a garage paint job and will look a lot cleaner when put back together. It's really too bad that the outside isn't already painted to match, but I'll get to that maybe next year. At least I can now start on the putting back together part of the project. It's almost exciting.
It has been a really long day however. I started early this morning with the goal in mind of getting the bay painted. I went to find a cutoff blade to cut the coil bracket off early this morning only to find that my freezer was leaking water out the door and it was unthawing. I have a son in law from Wyoming that we split a beef every year and as you can imagine dealing with the freezer took top priority. I pulled everything out, defrosted it, and put it all back in to see if it was going to get cold. 5 hours later it was cool, but nowhere near freezing. :( So a lot of my day was spent buying, unloading, jockying the old out and the new in and transferring the food. Oh and cooking some up to freeze for chilli or something. What a bummer, but it's taken care of at least. I still got the bay painted and as I post this I hear one of those BIG mouse traps go off. Yea, I've been trying to catch this huge mouse/rat that thinks he owns the house. This morning was his unlucky day. I hope he doesn't have family!!!
