Trunk stripping and priming

The trunk is a hot mess. There's no two ways about it. Unlike the floor, I had a pretty good idea about this early on. But, still, it's not something I looked forward to - the trunk has a lot of hard-to-reach areas and metal edges near the trunk hinges, plus some parts of the structure that are partially obstructed. Working in there, trying to strip all those edges with a wire wheel on the angle grinder is like being in a knife fight in a phone booth - dangerous, hard to move, and you know how it's gonna end anyway.

So, for this exercise, I broke down and bought some 3M strip-it discs for the die grinder. At $10 a pop, they aren't cheap. And if you run it over a sharp edge, it'll just obliterate itself in a puff of black disc material. But part of this job is to inform about the right tool for the job. After using these, I'm a fan. They really work where a DA sander won't reach and an angle grinder will just eat flesh instead of paint.

The 'before' shots show the horror of homemade carpet kits. In this case, there is foam backed padding and carpet that has been glued to the interior of the trunk with Liquid Nails or similar product, rust around the gas tank edge, and some rust on the trunk floors. 

Notice the carpet glued to the wheel housing and the grey foam all over.

Backside of the taillight panel. Yes, that's Liquid Nails on there.

Other side of taillight panel. More construction adhesive and foam, plus a lot of factory seam sealer.

 A trunk no self-respecting mobster would be caught dead in.

 Not a lot of action shots here. Just notice all the hard to reach spots and the surface rust hiding under the fill panel at top. It's recessed in there and could only be reached by a wire cup on a cordless drill and handheld sandpaper.

I admit - this part (called the 'fill panel' I think) was zero fun to strip inside.

 The trunk floors and gas tank flange were easiest to reach - but had the most rust. In the end, just pitting, no real metal cancer here. I stabbed at all of it with my awl first, because I'd be hacked if I took all the time to strip it just to find it was rotten anyway

The sound deadener on the quarter panels flung a nasty mess all over when removed with high speed rotating tools. Next time, I'll use a scraper and some stripper.

Shiny!

The backside of the taillight panel. No more Liquid Nails, just good metal.

Down inside the drivers side trunk drop-off behind the rear wheel. Notorious spot for rust as crud and dirt would sit here, get damp, and just slowly decay. This side looks pretty good.

The passenger side shows a little more metal pitting. It looks worse than it feels, but I'm a little worried about this. When I strip the outside of the quarter I'll know for sure how bad this really is. 

Every surface gets cleaned with SPI's wax and grease remover until the rags come out as cleans as they started. Then I mixed up 16 ounces of SPI red oxide epoxy primer, masked off the edges and shot it with both the little Lowes gun (straight up shots) and the Vapor (everything else).  I used the foam brushes again here as well - this time for the inner structures that could not be done properly with an HVLP gun.

And now the interior of the car looks quite a bit better. From this....

(The token sideways pic...Darn you, Blogger...)

To this...

It took about 40 hours to do the trunk area. Again, I'm new and I'm slow. And that includes the trunk hinge repair I haven't mentioned yet.

I now have a better feel for how to do surface prep, and then mix and spray the epoxy primer. Plus the interior looks like new and I really like that.This will all need seam sealing and then scuffed and a second coat of primer before it's really 'done', but that's still more fun than stipping it all down to bare metal. 

These shots are about a day after shooting the epoxy.  There's actually several weeks between shooting the floor and the trunk, not a couple days as the posts would lead you to think. After a while, the color settles downs and the gloss is not as bright. The Red Oxide is starting to grow on me. I have trouble convincing myself to do the second primer coat over it in black.