1969 Firebird restoration sandblast, welding, and epoxy primer Episode 3

I'm Rick from Carthage classic cars on this video we're back on what's left of the 69 Firebird in the last video you saw we cut this whole car apart to pretty much what was left it was pretty much a rusted Shell at this point on this video we're gonna go and we're going to take it and we're gonna sand blast it and when the goal at the end of this video is to get an epoxy so stay tuned I'll show you how we got it to this point in the blasting phase and I will come back I'll show you the next couple steps on what we're going to do the good thing about my frame jigs is while supporting the car we could take the levelers up and they're still mobile so I could sit there and load them up on my rollback drop it off down the road we have the Blaster set up away from everyone where the noise wouldn't bother anything I mean we live out in the country anyway so it doesn't really matter that much but still we do have people somewhat close by we can be away from them or not by the garage or anything blasting sand out in front of it and you see we're going to just drop this car off we're kind of in the shade a little bit I have a good spot here that's easy to clean up the good thing about the wet blasting 2 is it doesn't have a dust cloud that travels pretty far you know it's all gonna stay down on the ground there's no Cloud we only have to wear a face shield but what I'm doing on this Firebird I'm basically setting up the legs I don't care about being level this is more so while I'm blasting it doesn't move you can see the blast setup on the right that's the equal equip up EQ 600 it's a wet Blaster a vapor Blaster and you can see the compressor is behind us so here we are in the wet blasting phase you can see we're going to start spraying and you really see I mean this is sped up I'm adjusting the media and the water output a little bit but once we get dye land it really does move pretty quick obviously we're still in time lapse this whole car right here including the front subframe and the bumper area took me about two hours to blast and also wash down that's of compressor run time not the time it took you know to set up or anything else so I know there's a lot out there it says if you wet blast a car you ruin it you know it's going to rust down and Road in the future and all that etc etc so my opinion on the wet blast and where the rust come from is we're using a medium grit crushed glass so we're calling it sand but it's really recycled glass but what happens is it clumps up you ever go to the beach and you know you have that wet beach sand how it just gets stuck everywhere the keto wet blasting is is you need to be able to wash the car out if sand holds in areas of the car corners and everything else and stays there even though we're using a hold tight 102 in the water which is a rust preventative up to I think it's 72 hours if that sand is sitting there and it's holding moisture that part of the car will start rusting on the bare metal so the key to this whole wet blasting is to be able to wash the car out that's why you see most of the time when we wet blast cars they're mostly stripped anyway you see I did cut everything off this car so it's easier to get in every corner the sand doesn't stay in the car easier to wash out and we're not wasting valuable blast hours with media water and everything else on parts we don't not going to keep anyway obviously the water costs money because the hold tight the rust preventative stuff is kind of expensive but it's worth its way in gold obviously this is one of those jobs you're gonna be soaking wet when you're done you're going to have sand everywhere I could be wearing you know a set of coveralls or something like that but I didn't mind that much it's 90 something degrees today so today's a day to be able to be wet and soaking wet you're probably not going to see me in the middle of winter time 20 degrees out doing this kind of job but the benefits of sandblasting the wet blasting versus dry blasting I honestly for a frame like this I think the wet blasting is a little bit easier on the metal while also um removing the rust I think it keeps it cool I I think on this inner structure and how thick it is it doesn't matter that much I think the wet blasting in this situation is more operator friendly because you know they say you can wet blast external body parts without warping them I disagree I try to only do inner structure a car but if I was dry blasting I would have to wear so much more gear I'll worry about the Dust the neighbors everything else that this is just so much more eco-friendly also with being more efficient with the media so like I said earlier I think this is the most important part of the whole media blasting which is the wash down phase we don't have too much to wash down but you see I'm going over everything starting on the top working our way down we got our hold tight 102 rust prevented in it we had it since we started the blasting process the idea behind this is it dries on the car and basically sets the area up to be painted primed whatever you're calling but at this point we're not adding any outside water to this process what I also like to do when this whole thing is over we'll go back through with a wire brush a hand wire brush and dig it out of any Corners we might have missed and then go through before we go to Prime and then once it dries we're going to try to go with air and hit it really strong here's a couple pictures of the sandblasting process all complete back in the garage you can see the car is really clean we are going to add some osfo on it just because you see it's already getting dark and I got a lot of other stuff to do in the car we'll address that in a little bit you can see right now we got an arc shot on the TIG welder this is real time speed what I'm doing um TIG welding the front subframe on the firebird from the rear to front front to rear all the seams up coming from a racing background this is the first thing we usually do on the race cars is we go ahead and just box everything in and weld it since the factory welds really are spotted they could go an inch Stitch weld here an inch there and the welds really are real bad so this is going to strengthen up the whole front subframe and everything you can see I went over with the MIG welder on some of these other welds just because the factory welds are so dirty that anytime the TIG welder hits something it just throws impurities even with the sand blaster so what I'm doing I'm about 150 amps I'm using eighth inch filler rod on a 3 16 tungsten on a gas lens it's a blue hybrid tungsten that's like an all-in-one tungsten I'm DC welding and I'm just running down this what was really cool about welding this front subframe is really usually I weld 18 to 22 gauge so for a chance I really got to crank up my TIG welder and really run some solid passes on thicker mode now that you see how the whole wet plastic process works in general let's go ahead and take a look at the car you could see it's a different shade than when it was sandblasted as far as this subframe you can see the subframe we did weld up most of the underneath on the subframe just to make it a little stronger but why this looks a different color is I put some Oslo on it osfo is basically a rust preventer rust remover converter so where we went and we put this car into osfo the reason being we did two cars we did a sandblasted another car at the same time since we had to Blaster out so between that and all the work that we had to do on the front end I knew last night that I just didn't want to take a chance of the car having to flash rust so what I did I'm going to show you on this subframe because actually the subframe here we did miss a couple spots when I was blasting just it was hung upside down so what you're going to do like you said osfo it's in a bottle you get it pretty much any hardware store wear gloves and let's pretend I have a respirator on because this is acid so use your safety gear but basically you want to put a very little bit of this on so what I'm going to do I'm gonna just and be aware since it's acid don't get it on your floor or anything so I just put a little bit on and I take a damp Rag and I'm just wiping it down on the whole little bit of the bare metal so and the reason I'm putting it on this suffering too it'll convert the rust and it's going to enable me to let me work on this subframe for a couple more days and just do a couple more tweaks on it before we go ahead and actually epoxy we are going to go ahead epoxy the car beforehand but same thing around here we'll go a little bit heavier Palmer just dust it on and then what I don't want I don't want any residue I just want to come and stay like that so we're going to do the whole subframe that way like I said using a ventilated area as soon as we get done with the video I'll turn all the the fans and everything on and then we'll go ahead and put a respirator on while we're using this stuff but there you go you can actually just get the rag damp and wet it on so that's how the ospo goes and then you'll see this in about an hour or so maybe even shorter 30 minutes will actually start turning black I don't think this car has any on it but if you saw any rust areas left over that would turn black now with the osfo the osvo puts its acid so it has an acidic surface I've never had a problem with the epoxy primer we use but can look over the tdsg of the paint you use to make sure you can spray it over that most epoxies should be good however what I do like to do before we go ahead and actually paint or put our weld through primer on this thing I'll take some lacquer thinner and now everywhere I went with the osfo i want to neutralize the acidic level so we'll go ahead and we'll spray and I'm heavy with the lacquer thinner I'll do one area and we'll kind of just go over it with a red Scotch Brite and then so if the osfo is on any heavier if you see any scaly areas if you watch my video on the osfo on the The Challenger roof you'll see how it can get scaly if you do run into any of that it'll actually take it off with the scuff pad you can see it's a little bit gray there so that's going to give us a good prep surface so we could go ahead and the next step adding the weld through primer so let's go ahead I'm going to take care of this whole car I already did the other car where uh we blasted last night so that one's all done and then we're going to do we're going to go ahead and shoot our welder primer on both cars and then the next step is the epoxy face so stay tuned we're not going to epoxy for another day oh that's another thing with the osvo you can't paint on it for 24 hours so right now I this car and the other one we're 24 hours the next day using this it's the end of the day now so be aware you can't use it paint over for 24 hours so stay tuned let's get work on this car and we'll come back now that we're 24 hours after we applied to osfo we got all the lacquer thinner wiped down on the car it evaporated the cars all clean neutralized we're now applying the weld through primer at this point if you forget an area it's not the end of the world I also want to point out even from the time that the car came out sandblasting do not touch this bare metal with no gloves and your bare hands you really your grease everything in your skin will contaminate the paint you see I'm not wearing gloves right now I was wearing gloves before it's just one of those things I don't plan on touching the car with my hands right now using the spray can so we're just going to apply the well do primer and we're going to sit overnight here we are at the next day we're getting our epoxy mixed up and shaken in the paint Shaker to get going I you see I don't have gloves on right now because the gloves really stick to the tape and starts pulling them apart but but the only thing I'm really touching is the tape I'm trying to be really conscious about me just touching the tape sometimes I will be touching the weld through primer but under no circumstances at best I can like I said earlier I'll be touching the car's bare metal on the sandblast surface that's also an area that will create a rust spot but I'm going through I'm taping up everywhere we put the welder primer honestly with this I missed one or two spots if you do that you just gotta come back through later and you'll just have to do a little more work sanded it down that's what I'm doing right now basically with this tape and the welder primer since the car's already bare metal and I prepped it before sandblast as far as getting all the old metal off of it I'm able to just cover up these areas put the weld through primer and then once we pull the tape off the cars are ready ready for the new panel so if we out like I said one or two spots we missed we'll come back through it with the sanding disc something to remove that epoxy down to bare metal and then we'll just spray on the well through primer in the can same thing there's one or two spots I taped up here I realized I missed the well through primer I'll just go back through and spray it over the epoxy when we're done here we are we're going to go ahead and mix our epoxy primer on the firebird we are going to use the mp170 it's a black epoxy primer the key here is you need to look at the TDS sheet on the TDS sheet this epoxy calls for two to one to half a part acetone mixing ratio you could see I'm also mixing a white epoxy so we're going to spray the Cuda next to it the one that we sandblasted and the firebird at the same time how I'm doing this I'm adding my one part after the two parts and I'm tapping them off with the acetode I'm mixing both these primers and there's a 15 minute induction period so the goal is I'm mixing up these two first batches and then what I'm going to do I'm gonna go back from one to another and as the next one's inducting I'm spraying the epoxy before it and jumping back harder car because we need to flash time what I'm writing down on my makeshift old trunk floor table is how much epoxy I'm using basically it's real simple how I do epoxy I charge about an ounce so it's just easy for me as I'm pouring in I know how many ounces I'm using all in all between both of these cars we used a gallon and a half of epoxy so the white Cuda took most of it up you know obviously the firebird doesn't spray that much the thing about the epoxy too is when you sandblast it soaks it up a whole lot more versus hand stripping it with like a DA and everything so you see I got Bolt into disposable mixing cups I put a cap on one of them and now we're gonna shoot the firebird first in the gun once that's done we're waiting for it to flash we're gonna go back over to the Cuda the primer gun I'm using here is a Devilbiss Starting Line Gun I'm running my air pressure about 30 PSI at the gun and really just a consistent uh flow coming out uh checking my spray pattern I don't have the trigger pulled back all the way I pretty much bottom it out and then turned back down that uh paint flow about one and a half turns you see I'm kind of working that process I'm starting at the top of the car and I'm working my way down trying to keep a wet Edge all the time so basically wherever the paint is wet adding paint to the end of it so it flows in and it basically sticks to each other at that point once we're done with that section of the car we will not reapply epoxy until the car flashes over so this has give or take 15 to 25 minutes of a flash time now depending on humidity and temperature about 20 minutes before this uh in North Carolina it was torrentially downpouring outside you see it's nice and sunny right now so it's hit or miss on this but you'll be able to tell because the paint will go from a shiny kind of black to that dull finished black when it's all sand done that and you'll be able to touch a corner without leaving the imprint or your glove sticking so that's how you know the the paint's flashed over you want to make sure your epoxy is flashed over before you keep applying more because it's releasing the solvents in the primer this goes for paints everything else that's where you get the solvent pop and everything else or it bubbling up and it just if you pile on epoxy paints primers everything on top of each other without letting it breathe out and let the solvents Escape that's where you have issues so follow your tdsg everything I'm painting is written for you on a TDS sheet buy the book if you can read the directions and follow them you lessen your chance of having a major crisis down the road so this car and the car next to it both got two coats of epoxy the first coat really is gonna soak up in the sandblasting material and then the second coat really is the smooth lay it out protect and coat you see right now that both both coats have flashed out it's dry it's got that dull look to it we're gonna go back through and just remove all the tape now with the tape I didn't say it earlier I used the cheapest tape some of it you could see kind of flapping up as I'm priming that's the whole idea I don't want to use a really aggressive tape and be ripping off the weld through primer so even if it doesn't have a hard Edge it's not the end of the world for the most part this tape did its job and this is exactly what I like to use it for you could see how everything's prepped and we're really we got some rust repair but we're on and getting ready for the next stage and assembling the new parts here's a couple shots of the car all completed everything's done on it you know there's not that much left of the car but all in all the epoxy is now protected you could see some rust holes here and there that we need to address but in general I think this is much better protected than the factory would have ever done a Firebird in this sense and you could see as we're ripping apart there was Bare Metal everywhere and why these cars were so rusted underneath same thing with the subframe it's really protected and ready for the future use all right so we're going to wrap up the video on the 69 Firebird you saw everything we did with our sandblasting our bare metal preparation and now the car's in epoxy primer you also see we did our subframe I welded all the seams down the subframe we TIG welded it and around some of these seams right here I didn't mig weld it not everything is completely TIG welded do I think it's worth doing that no it's not worth if someone came up to me and said hey can you do this it's really not worth it but for me and my racing background and being it's my car it's something I personally want to do and I just think it's cool when you look down it and you see something that's not Factory you'd see we were real busy we also did epoxy this Cuda I I have a certain process I did both cars at the same time and that's why it took a little bit longer but efficiently we did the same process and taping up everywhere we're gonna Weld and you see this one's white the firebird's black so the key is well what epoxy do you use do you use a white epoxy or do you use a black epoxy really it comes down to user preference so epoxy is mostly there in this stage to protect bare metal some people use a thinned out epoxy as more of a sealer and if that's the case your sealer would have to be kind of the color you're going you don't want to put you know white on top of a black car if you're going to seal it now on the flip side the reason this car is black I'll give you a little bit on what I'm thinking is the chassis of this car is going to be painted black it's a GM car so now that we've done black if we're doing chassis paint or something on the inside and I missed something we already got the black epoxy to hide behind versus a gray or a white I think the white epoxy over here you could see more imperfections you can see where the vinyl top holes are for this car I don't know if you can see them on the camera but everywhere you could see rust holes on this car and everything stands out a lot easier so sometimes is bright white is easier to work with so it really like I said it's personal preference it's what you want to do we're going to be putting black e-coat Parts on both of these cars so really the epoxy is your base coat another good thing about having a darker epoxy is really if you do a white 2K and anything else your high build primers are white when you start sanding down when you hit the black you know it's time to stop because you're about to hit bare metal which really the white is going to stand out a little bit too not as easy as the black so all in all that's where we're at you see the same thing on the firebird everywhere we put our weld through primer should be ready to go for the most part we still have metal work to do on the car you can see back here there's holes here and there I didn't have time when we were sandblasting to sit there and get to every hole so really before the next video I'm gonna go through this car front to back and I'm gonna look at every rust hole and I must start welding and fixing our small path sections if we had to take every panel off this car that had every they needed a little repair there would literally be nothing left this is all that was somewhat good on this car so we're gonna do that while we're gone just to know um this is the process we do this because it's easy to rip apart the parts sandblast the only things we need put it in epoxy what we're going to keep and now we start building on the car when we come back on the next video on this Firebird the next thing we're going to do is we should be starting installing Parts uh we're gonna start with the rear frame rails and work our way forward and work on the floor pan I have a process I have an idea on how it's going to go so stay tuned and we'll try that out as far as the parts the good thing is I ordered most of these parts already I got right now half the car is going to be full AMD the other half is going to be dynacorn um I went straight to AMD and ordered my parts for anyone that thinks I'm being sponsored and you know hey you should uh you know be nice to build a car like this when the parks are given for free nothing on this car right now is given for me for free if anyone knows anyone that wants to throw Parts at this car reach out to me um the good thing about not being sponsored is I kind of give my honest opinion on everything so AMD I think and dynacorn which half the cars would be dynacorn too we have every single part I think they're the best of the best of the parts I do have one good Mark door and one good Mark in our front fender for the car in our wheel housing in the front and that was just left over from the f-body project that someone just left it here for me so we're going to test fit those it might come out okay if I don't like it we'll go ahead and order the match door for the car but uh shout out to Aaron at the installation Center she was actually a dynacorn dealer that helped helped me out in ordering the parts and I guess give her a list so she if you don't want to go through Summit Jegs and you want to find someone that could find all the parts at certain warehouses and get the parts shipped to you go check her out um so that's where we're at like I said if anyone you know has any questions on the car we're going to do a full build on the car I really think this is the way to do it and get a good solid car when it's all said and done we cut out all the rust we got rid of all the rust we're going to fix a couple patches and we're gonna start the build process so stay tuned hopefully this Firebird kind of gives you ideas and motivation on your car like our video subscribe to our Channel we're trying to do more and more of this it's going to be a couple weeks before we really get back on this car being all the small patching we got to do but once the videos start on the next build process on this car they're really the GM cars are awesome because they are really big pieces um they just you know you put a floor in half the car looks like it's done so I don't think it's going to be that long on the build process but stay tuned and we'll see what we can do so I'm Rick from cartoons classic cars and we'll see in the next video

Channel: Carthage Classic Cars

Views: 8,961

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Id: DoFqjvattRk

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023