Back in beige

[911hillclimber]

Can't help you really but you seem to be over-thinking this?
I get the same problem when washing cars, brainless activity so the mind wanders, but I used to think endlessly about work not the 911 or the racer.

I think your thoughts are good though. It is a great shell by the best so whatever you do it will look classy, just what is 'classy' in your imagination?

To have some thing unique I think, but what is available and how will that look?

It is an old sports car re-do to how you want it as a machine but not yet as an image.
Do you want it to look it's age?
Do you want it to look a resto job of the period
Do you want it a lost racer look?

Do you want it to be a feature car in Custom Car?

I think I would scour the google site for 911 hot-rods, custom paint etc and see what comes up, or simply paint it like Darren's done, solid colours in a dramatic look and stunning quality. The latter was probably what Porsche was trying to do when it was original..

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=porsc ... d=0CCAQsAQ

[haasad]

[quote="jamie"] My 912, in bare metal, is insanely beautiful. Utterly pure and perfect. I walk into my garage, and I can't help but stop and look at it. I am aware that it's only a f***ing car, but my god, they totally nailed that rear 3/4 aspect from the off.
If I could, I'd run the car as it is, in bare metal, and it would look amazing. Back in the real world, it's going to need painting.[/quote]

Could the above be a possibility....surely there is some product that would protect but not diminish the sentiment expressed above.

Andy

[shoestring7]

I collected some pics of grey/silver cars when I was deciding on paint for my car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/37571417@ ... 414125696/

C>

[inaglasshouse]

Jamie,

I've enjoyed your build thread very much - many thanks. More recently I'm enjoying your musings / anguished cries for help of a tortured soul.

Couple of thoughts. I shall be as pretentious as possible to make you look down-to-earth:

1) The very fact that you are considering this deeply, and have engaged fully with the detail of your build, means there is no wrong answer. This is connoisseurship - you understand and care deeply about the car and, as long as you are happy with the conclusion you reach, that's all that matters. You're already writing down your thought processes - keep doing that, keep the notes and look back on them in future. Hopefully you can feel that yes, at the time, you thought about it properly and made the best decision you could. Your views / preferences may change in future but you'll probably still feel affection for the car as you chose to finish it, because it will be a reflection of your considered opinions now.

2) Sounds like you are beyond this anyway, but just in case... Using resale value as a metric is a category error - it's just not answering the right question. Whether or not you make money on a resto is best not thought about, unless you are specifically doing it as a business (in which case the profit is at least part of the satisfaction). If it's a hobby then the moment of sale hence profit may never happen, and if it does it will be one moment in time. An hour at an auction or a few days of negotiation with a buyer. The joy of ownership of your creation, on the other hand, is every day, every drive, every time you open the garage door. Every day, if you have followed your own ideas, you can look at your car and say "that's mine". As opposed to "I'm glad I did that because I'm going to make x% more come resale, one day in the future, which may not come, and unless the wider market tanks which is outside my control anyway".

In short - do whatever you want and enjoy it to the full.

Cheers, Richard.

[jamie]

Thanks Richard. I'm fully on board with point 2, and I do think you're right about point 1. I appreciate your thoughts.

Time to bring this build crashing back out of its scratchy-beard ivory tower...

Last night, after a good 40 minutes of staring / musing in the garage, I decided that it would be a good idea to start cleaning-up the small flecks of surface rust from the shell. In a phone call to Nick Moss a few weeks ago, he had mentioned that I shouldn't have had the doors stripped as the lower seams tend to rust when the original sealer / paint is removed. Done already, oops.

Anyway, I had this brainwave to tip some POR-15 Metal Prep rust converter down there and let it seep into the seams. It worked nice, turning the small amounts of rust (yep, can't get away from it) black, and very easy to scrape away.

After that, I loaded some more Metal Prep into my spray gun and shot the whole shell.

This morning, I opened the garage door to me met with what now looks like something that has been dragged out of the sea.

I don't need to explain how I felt. I went silent for about two hours.

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OK, the rust that's there is very light on the surface. It can be removed with some elbow grease, planel-wipe and scotchbrite. I hit the rear quarter with 80-grit on a DA, and it goes back to bare metal OK. The problem is going to be the hard-to-reach places - up under the dash, in the nooks and crannies of the front, inside the light clusters and so on.

I thought about it all day and concluded that I have two options:

1. Take the car back to EnviroStrip.
2. Scrub the whole car back to bare metal by hand.

The pro of option 1 is that it would be easy. The cons are that I'd need to deliver the car up there and back (two days of my life) and the process isn't exactly cheap. Also, the process removes the lead from the car, and Barry has leaded some areas in the car. I'd also be worried about my nice new heater tube getting wrecked.

The pros of option 2 is that it is cheap and doesn't damage the lead or heater tube. The con is obviously that it's a fuckload of work to do it right.

I need to buy a gazebo so I can epoxy-prime the car anyway, so I could sand the panels I can sand, then put the car in the gazebo and go at the fussy bits with soda out of my blasting pot.

I really wish I hadn't done this

[hot66]

Instant rat-look

Anchor wax the body, paint you wheels red with white wall tyres, put on a roof rack with a coke cooler strapped to it & your sorted ..... Oh, and slam it

[haasad]

It will be fine, scotchbrite is your friend....

[911hillclimber]

To me this says it is time to make your mind up and press on.
I would have died if I had found that on my shell.

You can at least get a primer over it!

[inaglasshouse]

Ouch! Beard scratching was safer. I've done a bit of that today and, as a result, have hardly broken anything at home.

When the above is sorted out and you don't want it to rust again - please accept a personal recommendation for ACF50:
http://www.learchem.com/products/acf-50.html
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.aspt=1066179
Very good stuff. (I have no commercial vested interest).

Although in the case of a bare shell that will see paint fairly soon, the fact that it creeps like mad into seams etc might not be good news. Depends on the prep you plan immediately pre-paint.

Cheers, good luck, Richard.

[Darren65]

F***ing f***!

[KS]

If you lived in Cornwall, the unprotected shell would have looked like that in a matter of hours...

[sladey]

I'd recommend FE123 from rustbuster -rust converter - you can spray it into the hard to reach places and it turns black as it converts the rust. You can then epoxy mastic over it


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[jamie]

Few more photos.



Left side of the dash cleaned with wire wool and Coca Cola:



Left seat pan cleaned with Jenolite. Right seat pan cleaned with Coca Cola:



Strut mount cleaned with POR-15 Metal Prep and wire wool. Wiped off before it was allowed to dry...



The rust comes off OK. I think I may DA the big bits, then get a mobile sand-blaster to do the fiddly bits around the dash, front and rear bays, rear seats etc.

It has been 14 months since it was at EnviroStrip, so it needed attention before I could paint it. Just didn't envisage f***ing it up as much as this first.

[myatt1972]

Coca Cola ! Really Wont that just leave a sticky mess ?

[jamie]

Phosphoric Acid.

I won't drink it, but I'll happily prep metal with it.