RA29 Build part 3

By Eric

It’s time to get dirty!!   As I had mentioned before, the “bananarama special”  paint job on the Celica looked like it could have been some one’s highschool auto body project.  And if that is the case, I hope they got a big fat F.  It has all the signs of a shotty paint job, bodylines that mysteriously disappear, orange peel for days, dents that can be seen inside the car but not on the outside, moulding and trim overspray, and my favorite…..   painted over factory stickers.

Can you see the GT?  Needless to say, if we are going to do a proper restoration on this the only thing to do is take it all the way down to the metal.   So the next question is how?   There are many ways to go about this and I considered every one of them.  First would be acid dipping the entire thing.  The benefits being that is probably the easiest way to go and most likely  the only sure fire way to get every bit of paint and goo out of every nook and cranny.  The cons of acid dipping is that even if we had someone in SLC that could do it, I’m sure it would be way out of our budget for this car.  I’ve also heard that the acid used can remain in the seams of the chassis and eventually seep out over time which, as you can imagine would probably not be the best thing for your new paint job.  There’s also horror stories of entire rusty cars coming out of  their acid baths in pieces!

The next method I considered was soda blasting.  I think this would probably be the best route to go with this car as I haven’t  really heard  much bad about this method, and we could just drop off our yellow shell and pick it up in a matter of days.  But with the cost ranging anywhere from $1000 to $1500 you have to really have a nice budget to play with.

Sand blasting is much cheaper in the $300 to $500 range, but it can be pretty brutal if the person doing the blasting isn’t careful.  And if you end up with a bunch of pitted and warped panels the money you save will go right back into repairing them.

Now the cheap route to go is aircraft stripper.  You can do an entire car with less than 2 gallons of the stuff and all you need is the desire to put in some serious work.  Not being one to shy away from some good ol’ fashioned manual labor I said to myself what the hell,  strapped on some gloves, goggles, and respirator and decided to get busy!  There’s only one way to see if it’s worth it or not, and that’s to do it.

Now you might be wondering why I look like I’m ready for chemical warfare.  Let me just tell you that this stuff is seriously nasty.  If it gets on your skin you’ll know it because it will feel like someone is burning you with a hot poker.  I can only image what it might feel like in you eyes, hopefully with the proper precautions I’ll never know.  The method is pretty straight forward,  use a paintbrush and spread a libereal amount one panel at a time and prepare for magic……

It will start to bubble up, and when it stops it’s time to get out your putty knife and get your scrape on!

It’s almost like unwrapping a Christmas present because on something like this you never really know what you might find.  I guess I was pretty crappy this year because all I found underneath was a ton of bondo, a bunch of holes from a slide hammer,  and rust

Goop, scrape, repeat.  Goop, scrape, repeat.  Results may vary as it depends on how many layers of paint (or bondo) is on your car.  This one had a couple of layers of paint and as you can see plenty of bondo.  You will need to manually sand the bondo as the stripper only really works in the paint.   A little DA sander action to finish it up and ……

As you can see I have my work cut out for me to get this thing straight, and this is the good side.  You can also see quite a bit of surface rust starting to form under the paint that we would have never caught had we not taken it all the way down to the metal.  I also did all of the fender wells, engine bay, and underneath the car.

Now that it’s been torn down, It’s time to bring it back.  In the next installment we will build a custom subframe to house the new motor and rack and pinion steering.  See you in part 4!