Anyone had their 914 body shell stripped?

[george21]

At the moment I'm loking for company who can dip the body shell in primer and bake it in temperature not exceeding 70c degrees. So i could apply body solder before it goes for primer bath.
Any suggestions would be appreciated

[RichardJ]

The only company that I am aware of offering any kind of dip painting of shells for restorations in the UK is SPL. All the OEM's dip paint, and some subcontract it to teir 1's like GKN in Telford. It's understandable than few if any of them would want anything they were not totally in control of going anywhere near their paint if you think of the value of that kind of amount of paint. A tank 4m x 2.5m x 1.5m would hold 15000 litres of paint. Even if they get the paint for £10 a litre in bulk (I imagine it's more, but am only guessing), that's £150,000 of paint in the tank. They're not going to risk contaminating that by dipping a shell which has been cleaned using unknown processes which are beyond their control in it.
SPL used to have such an arrangement with whoever operated the LDV Vans paint plant. They used to have a really detailed explanation of the whole process with lots of photos on their web site. The process included going through the same cleaning process as the production shells. It was very involved, with many dips in different tanks to clean, rinse, and probably phosphate wash the shell before it got to the paint tank. The whole process was on overhead conveyors, and would clearly have cost many millions to install. From what I have read, when LDV Vans closed, SPL lost access to this dip painting process, and have since installed their own dip tanks. It is sized for car shells which are dipped sideways - they can no longer dip taller vehicles like a VW bus. The video on their site showing the process looks like they have quite an impressive painting process for a non OEM company or supplier.

The bit I don't understand is how they arrange for the paint to get in and the air to get out of all the enclosed body sections on shells which were never designed for dip painting. Having worked on the design of large OEM fabrications which were dip painted, the level of attention needed to get the positions of holes which are only therefor this purpose, relative to the dipping direction is surprising. I worked on chassis which were also dipped sideways. Various parts which would be a mirror image of each other for each side were actually different just to get the paint to flow in and the air out correctly. Few car restorers would understand this unless they have been involved with the dip painting process a lot, and even fewer would be prepared to cut all the necessary holes in their body shells.

PPG's web site says their e-coat dip paints are intended to be baked at between 185 and 400 degrees C depending on the item being painted and the time it'll spend in the oven, so it sounds like 185 may be a minimum.

[majordad]

Ninemeister sent my 2.4s to SPL in 2013 and it had the full works treatment, delighted with the result. Before treatment holes were cut in strategic locations to allow full access.

[RichardJ]

Decision made! My 914 shell and hinging panels were collected by Prostrip (Nottingham) on Friday for stripping via pyrolysis and de-rusting via their phosphoric acid based system. It'll be interesting / scary when it comes back in a few weeks to see how much rust was lurking which I hadn't found, hidden by paint, etc, and also time to send a big order to Restoration Design once I know exactly what panels to buy.
I took the heater pipes out (otherwise they would have been destroyed by the pyrolysis oven) by removing a section of the inner sills after grinding the pipe clip rivet heads off, as the outer sills, threshold panels and triangular gussets appeared to be in excellent condition. On getting the heater pipes out I was relieved to see very very little corrosion inside the sills, despite the RH one having a small hole through from the 'hell hole' corrosion. It seems it's been caught just in time.

[chief]

Looking forward to some pics of this project Richard.

[RichardJ]

I had planned to do a build thread on here when I started the project, but not having used web forums for many years, I didn't realise they don't seem to host photos these days, but rely on 3rd party hosting. I'm not a fan of any kind of cloud storage, so have never hosted pics or anything else online.
I have taken hundreds of pics of my 914 project so for (mostly so I stand a chance of putting it back together correctly!), and looking into online hosting so I can put pics on here has been on my 'to do' list for weeks - just not at the top. The hassle with Photobucket and the other one which changed it's domain name recently have done nothing to get me enthused about online hosting either. I may have a go at ftp-ing them onto my own web space, but would need to look into batch converting them to a lower res somehow first. As the purpose of the project is to do something other then working most of the time (a large percentage of which is sat at a computer), and this IT stuff doesn't interest me as much actually working on the project, restoring bits has been my priority, especially while I've had a deadline to get it ready for Prostrip to collect.

[RichardJ]

I finally got around to hosting my project photos online, so have started a restoration thread ( viewtopic.php?f=28&t=63050&p=568342#p568342 , "1975 914 1.8 Restoration"). At the time of writing I have written up everything body shell related up to the point of the shell going to be stripped. In the next day or two I'll add the pics of what came back. Any further discussion of the stripping process from me will be in the restoration thread.....