Week #77

Now that the main trunk floor is welded in as good as it's gonna be I thought it might be nice to give it a coat of Eastwood's self-etching primer. The metal has been protected by a treatment of "Oxy-Solve"(I think it's called something else now) since being initially installed way back whenever. The surface has kept it's "metal" look over the last 7 or 8 months and I had no real reason for concern that it might rust. Now I plan to disguise the ground down fake spot welds as bonified spot welds, and that would require a surface that I could see some body work progress on.

As I ran my hand over the surface to see how dirty and dusty it was, I couldn't help to notice collections of the Oxy-Solves residue built up in little dried puddles here and there. That wouldn't do. Blew off the dirt, broke out the pre sanding stuff and then started giving the entire surface a good once over with some Scotchbrite, with some area requiring some honest-to-goodness sandpaper to dig up some really stubborn crud. That was a MUCH more time consuming job than I thought it would be! But it had to be done... I think I'll try to be more careful when coating with Oxy... the next time. The final step was to wash the whole surface down with grease and lacquer cleaner.

I got to use my HVLP paint gizmo. I bought it many years ago from TIP when they first came out. I understand that they have improved these systems since I bought mine but I'll just have to stick with what I got. It's a single stage(?) unit for one man/small job stuff and has worked very well for me and the tasks I've asked of it. I have yet to spray any color with it but have painted a car and a half worth of brackets and coated the '72 with filler/primer several times and it was no trouble at all. I never really thought I was using it correctly because I was still getting tons of over spray and using lots of paint. Since I was gonna fire it up again, I thought I'd take some time to experiment a little with it to try to get paint to cover good with as little over spray as possible.

The HVLP gun is as simple of a device to adjust as you could imagine. There is a big honkin' knob at the handle that goes from no air through the gun to full air through the gun in a quarter of a turn. Then there's your "fluid" adjustment at the back of the handle which basically adjusts how far you can pull in the handle. Finally there is the spray pattern adjustment at the nozzle... just turn it one way for a tall thin conventional looking pattern, and back the other for a squattyer to round pattern(I've had the gun spraying as fine as an airbrush before). Anyway, This time out I tried opening up the "fluid" all the way and opened the air flow just enough for it to draw and spray with a decent pattern. THAT WORKED GREAT... I don't know where my head was at before. After a slight adjustment here and there, this thing was laying down a beautiful 8" pattern of easily controlled paint... er... primer... well, you gotta start somewhere.

Got a good two thinnish coat on the trunk floor and opened up the gun to see how much paint was left. I had filled the cup about three quarters full and there was not quite a quarter of the cup left. I'm not sure how that equates to surface area covered but I'll state my findings as officially as I can by saying... that tickled the poop out of me! :)