Week #88

During the week I made a quick trip to the local blast media supplier and picked up 15 bags of my favorite sand blasting sand... that's 750 pounds worth. That's right, my weekend was planned. I was going to get this car sand blasted, and with it now up on the rotisserie, I was actually looking forward to it. I wasn't sure if I would need that much sand but I didn't want to be a bag short if I got on a roll.

I got out in the garage fairly early. With the bottom of the car easy to get to I proceeded to remove the things that were still attached. The fuel lines, brake lines and their assorted clips were a breeze to remove with the car up-ended. I bagged and tagged those parts along with the stuff that was removed along with the emergency brake. Some after market exhaust hangers found their way to the garbage along with about 10 pounds of dirt and crap that had found the floor when the car was rotated.

When I first built the rotisserie I had installed 4" hard plastic casters. These wouldn't work here at this garage due to the 3/4 inch drop/lip at each garage door. I had since picked up a set of 8" air tire casters and had installed them this time around. The lip was no problem with these babies! I rolled the car out onto a large concrete slab out behind the shop and got all set up for blasting. The rotisserie make this normally awful chore much more tolerable... no laying on the ground to get the low areas, no climbing in the engine bay to get the tight spots, just bring the low areas and tight spots to you!

Over the weekend I had just enough sand to get the engine compartment with front frame rails(back to the "transmount cross frame"), the doorjambs, the rear wheel well areas and also give the underside a kinda "quick cleaning" sorta go over. That's right, I used all 15 bags and didn't have enough to completely blast the whole car. I used to collect up the sand for use a second time but It's just not worth it... the time it takes to sweep it up and sift it back into the blaster, is just not worth the $2.50 a fresh bag of good cutting sand is.

This upcoming week I will be getting some more sand for next weekend. I will need to remove the small area of undercoating smack in the middle of the trans tunnel but with the either the torch and scrapper or the lovely smelling diesel fuel, I should have that off in plenty of time.