Brake calipers, and Undercoating Sucks

Got the brake calipers cleaned up, but they still need a rust conversion treatment and some paint.  Once painted, they'll look nice and shiny and brand stinking new.

This first picture you can see the nice plastic and rubber bands I used to seal off the bleed screws and the brake line fitting.  The fitting will be replaced, but you don't want any water getting inside that brake caliper.

This next picture you can see the calipers drying.  they fit perfectly on the lip of the gigantic steel deep sink in my basement.  That sink is probably one of the coolest things about this house.  At this moment, the calipers are still there, waiting for me to get off my butt and get them painted.  I need to mask off the piston seals before I hit them with the Metal Prep.  I also found a similar Rustoleum conversion/etch product that I may test on these, just to see how well it works.  I may just get some liquid mask, and use that to protect everything during treatment and painting.  I thought about Vaseline, but that just sounds messy.
 

That all happened about two weeks ago.  This weekend, I spent the whole day Saturday under the car scraping off the old asphalt-based undercoating.  That stuff is truly evil.  I've tried multiple ways of getting it off.  No solvent seems capable of removing it, although aircraft stripper does seem to eat on it a little bit.  A wire wheel will remove it, but it melts and spatters, and almost makes more of a mess than it's worth.  So I grabbed a paint scraper, and Lo and Behold, it scrapes right off.  There are some tight places that will have to be hit with a wire wheel, but for the most part, scraping seems to be the most effective.  In the pictuer above, you can see the black areas where the undercoating hasn't come off, versus the lighter areas where it has.  I have a thin coat of aircraft stripper on there to help remove the light stuff left from scraping.

This is another good shot of the before and after.  The dark stuff is where I haven't hit it yet.  You can see some nice little rust spots under there, too.  But I haven't found any really nasty surprises yet (knock on wood).

I have it just over halfway done, as far as scraping goes.  I'll still have to clean it down to the paint/metal, rough the surface up, and then get it treated and coated with Metal Prep and POR-15, followed by a coat of black Rustoleum to give the POR-15 some UV protection.  Similar to how I prepped the subframe.

Here's another quick shot of the repaired floor area.  I still have some major cleanup to do here, but it's good for now.  I want to get all that undercoating off before I do much more there.  I still need to grind those welds flush, fill any pinholes, and then apply some Duraglas filler and prep for paint.  But that will probably mostly have to wait until I have the quarter panels done.

Speaking of which, after some cleanup, on the Left side, I did discover that I'll have to replace both the inner and outer wheelhouse--maybe.  It's possible that I could repair the inner wheelhouse.  I'll have to get the quarter off to know for sure.

 


That's the next phase of the project, then.  Removal and replacement of the driver's side quarter.  But that won't happen until I'm done with this awful undercoating chore.