Project: Me

[Fortyseven]

I tinker with a lot of stuff simultaneously and don't really know where the best place to put this stuff would be... Do I create a new thread for everything or just put it all under one? I don't know. I decided it would probably be easier if I just put it under one. If there's issue with this let me know and I'll try to set it up to follow the format.




Tinted some family cars.




The rear glass on the Camry hasn't been tinted yet. The quarter windows on the rear doors are such a pain to work on. The gaskets are incredibly dirty and impossible to clean. On top of that, it's difficult to cut the tint to the right size on those. You can't slide the tint under the gasket easily on these because of it's age/construction and if you cut it too small you end up with gaps around the edges where light shines through. It's better imo to cut the tint smaller and have gaps rather than try to cut it to gasket size or even a little over gasket size, and slide it under the gasket, but my OCD tends to have me trying to get a perfect fit every time which results in several do-overs for those quarter windows.





I'd prefer darker for the rear window but I only have 35%. Maybe I could cheat a bit and just lay another 35% on top.



Ideally when one is tinting a vehicle, it should be prepared by cleaning it as thoroughly as possible. Tint will highlight every spec of dirt and not adhere at all to surfaces that aren't properly prepared. Above was a bad idea but I had the exhaust currently being worked on so I couldn't easily pull it out to wash so I just tried to cut it carefully.



It ends up adding time and work but masking the gaskets if you can't remove the window, or even just remove the gaskets, is the best method. The Dakota I did, I had to re-do the driver window 3 times because of dirt getting caught under the tint every time.









Dakota threw a P0132 and I was like WTF? Put it on the scanner and saw the upstream O2 sensor was just sitting at 1.0V not changing through off, start, idle, rev etc. and it wouldn't enter closed loop, so I put it on the lift and saw this:




Some animal (probably dead ( I hope ( and that it was painful))) chewed through a very oily and gunk/unhealthy chemical covered O2 sensor pigtail.



Bit of a derp moment, to make removing the O2 sensor easier, I just cut the pigtail because I was thinking I'd have to replace the sensor until my dad walked in and just asked why I need to replace it when I can just repair it. I cut it too close to the sensor body to fix so now I need to buy another when I could of just repaired this one.

[Kaan]

you have plenty of space on that O2 sensor... just get the soldering iron out. if you arent that good yet, there is only one way to practice!

[*insertusernamehere*]

Who are you?

[Senor_Taylor]

Wow, hands in all of the pies! I guess one thread is a good idea if it's lots of small things on many different vehicles. If you end up knowing you're going to make a lot of posts about one project, maybe then make a new thread.

It's interesting seeing someone do tint work. I have no clue how it's done.

[Fortyseven]

Who are you?

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You may be right Kaan. The one that concerned me in particular was the white one. It's about 1/4" away from the sensor body. It's irrelevant now though, I already purchased a new one.

Alright Taylor, I'll keep that in mind. I just learned to tint from watching the guy do my Cobra and asking him lots of annoying questions. It takes a lot of practice to get right and one I'm still improving at.

[Kaan]

You may be right Kaan. The one that concerned me in particular was the white one. It's about 1/4" away from the sensor body. It's irrelevant now though, I already purchased a new one.

perfect chance to pull it out of the trash and practice IMHO.

[Fortyseven]

Been a while since I posted.

Got a new hat. Thanks James.


I've been borrowing my fathers Jeep and it was starting to show some surface rust. You might recognize it from the trail ride we did last Octoberish. Unfortunately as I to stripped the paint down to repair I realized it was the dreaded cancer rust that starts from the inside and propagates outwards meaning the damage was exponentially worse than I realize since the back of the panels had rusted severely and had finally reached a point that it had completed rusted through the entire panel.



Cut out the damaged sections leaving the parts that were still rust free. This isn't a show car job; I left as much as I could to give me a "skeleton" to make welding the new patches on easier.

The gray paint you see is zinc weld through primer which is a sacrificial anode to prevent galvanic corrosion aka rust. It's basically a zinc powder suspended in a paint at a high % concentration. The stuff creates toxic fumes when welding so it's important to use a respirator.







Cutting some metal to replace damaged sections. I used paper to make templates and then used aerosol adhesive to glue it to the sheet metal to make a guide so that it would be easier to cut.







Here is it is with some body filler before shaping. I had to use the Jeep again so I needed to stop at a "safe" point in the repair. After shaping the body filler, I applied a coat of epoxy primer over the filler to seal it and allow me to drive it again. Body filler is a polyester plastic filler that is porous and acts like a sponge to moisture. It's very bad to let it get wet or sit for a long period of time as it will cause the metal it's sitting on to begin to rust. If it gets wet or left unattended, you must remove all the filler and start over.

[Fortyseven]

Switching gears again here.


My pickup has suffered clear coat failure from the poor quality control Dodge uses and frankly it looks awful. It's a 1999 and it had the damage when I first bought the car back in 2005 only growing worse with time. Meaning the paint started to fail when it was less than 6 years old. Another example of the complete garbage Dodge produces.

Since it's the length and width but not the height of a full size truck, I realized it would be a lot easier to split the refinish (paint job) into two, front (cab) and rear (bed). Since I'm planning on painting it a solid black I won't have any issues with separating it into components like you would have if you were spraying pearls and metallics have when laying down during different painting days.






Please excuse the moss growing on it everywhere. It suffered a minor accident in 2009 and I repaired it but never got around to repainting it. It ended up sitting behind our house for approximately 6-7 years growing plants.





Here you can see the clear coat failure all along the top surfaces. The roof has only 1% of the clear left on it. It's definitely received the most damage.

[Fortyseven]

Debadging the emblems. Dodge in their infinite wisdom uses dowel pins to locate the emblems so it leaves large gaping holes once you remove the badges. I had to weld them up, grind them smooth and apply some body filler. You can see where the repair was done on the lower front fender.



I also went ahead and shaved the antenna.







Epoxy primer is the greatest thing ever invented for auto body. The epoxy is a two part polymer that once mixed and has a finite pot life before it sets. I learned to cheat it by storing the unused amount in a refrigerator since if it's below a certain temperature (~55*F), it wont have enough energy to cure, even with the catalyst added. It's actually against recommendation to refrigerate it like this and if I was doing anything larger than spots I'd mix up a fresh batch, but for small spots like this I don't mind using it.



It's time to begin stripping down the old damaged paint. I decided to strip it down completely to metal in the areas that clear coat failure happened since basecoat isn't formulated to resist UV radiation so unseen damage can and did occur lower in the paint layers.

In retrospect since I'm not planning on making it a show car, I feel I could of been okay stopping at the E-Coat. The damaged areas were so rock hard that even with 36 grit I couldn't easily remove the old paint that had suffered from clear coat failure. I ended up using an abrasive nylon wheel attached to an angle grinder.







I'm making the job easier on myself mentally by overlapping a lot of these stages. Instead of stripping everything down at once I'll just do a few panels and then do some body work etc. That's why some of the pictures you see show a hint of what I'm working on elsewhere at the time.

Here is one of the front fenders with the damaged sections of the clear coat removed. Sections with the clear coat failure had to be removed but sections without were just stripped down a bit. I didn't feel it was necessary to strip them as once I overcoat them, all UV radiation will be blocked preventing any further degradation of the clear. Is this the proper way to do a show car? No. Will this last 20 more years? Yes. Will it last 50 years? Maybe.



I finished the metal with 80 grit on a DA to give it the perfect amount of mechanical adhesion with the epoxy primer I'll be spraying on it.

[Fortyseven]

Had some old computers and other electronics ready to be brought to the local landfill. To prevent the possibility of anyone finding private data on the hard drives, they had to be destroyed. Finally have a real reason to use the AR-15 I bought a few years ago. Unloaded a clip into them from about 50-75 yards on a rest. (sorry no sharp shooter here)

















Amazing how fat the pins are on an mid 90's computer processor.

[Fortyseven]

Sprayed an all over of epoxy to seal and lock down the previous layers. Building up too many layers of paint is very bad as paint is only as strong as it's weakest layer so it's more likely to fail if its too thick/too many coats. Thicker coats also means more strain on the paint due to the thermal expansion of materials due to the day/night summer/winter cycles. I sprayed the epoxy reduced 50% to make it more of a sealer than primer so there is only about 0.5 maybe 0.75 mil thickness on this coat.

Also note how I picked a black primer/sealer as I will be painting the truck black. This reduces the number of color (basecoat) coats that will need to be applied reducing cost of materials.







I was running late and ended up spraying the epoxy sealer right after sunset and bugs manged to find their way in and die stuck in wet paint. A mistake I will try to avoid in the future. The patches you see are fresh paint spot applied in areas where I had to sand out dead bugs the next day. It is of no concern with the exception of labor since we're still in the "primer" phase.

[Fortyseven]

Time to begin with the sanding primer. This is a urethane primer rather than a poly so it doesn't build up as much. Both are useful but for my purposes, since I'm not willing to purchase both, I went with the urethane. It is more of a "finishing" primer for use right before basecoat while poly is more of a "liquid bondo" and still needs a sealer.

Mmmm paint.











This is where it gets ugly again. Block sanding commences and you can clearly see the highs and lows.



After a second coat of primer.





Here you can see a close up of how primer works. Below is a close up shot of the hood where damage (hail?) has occurred. What many people don't realize is that when you dent a panel, it doesn't just push in, you also get "mountains" surrounding the "valley" which become high spots. Professionals using body hammers to knock the dents out don't go straight to the dent and knock it out. They first start with the highs, the mountains, and level them out as well.

You can see how the panel has become warped and as it was sanded, red spots started showing up. This is the original color of the hood and it shows where the "high" spots are. The valleys, or "low" spots are where the primer remains. Eventually you will sand it entirely flat with the primer filling in all the valleys.

You don't want to hose on the primer as the paint thickness will grow and become unstable. Ideally you spray the primer on knowing you'll sand off a good 75% of it. You want to minimize the amount of paint thinness applied. Remember to sand in a cross hatch pattern.

[Fortyseven]

To explain a bit more about block sanding a body smooth:

A good contrasting color really helps when knowing when you've sanded through to the lows. I used some orange spray paint dusted on from a distance. The idea isn't to spray it on wet and become a pain to remove. You want to spray it from a distance so the semi-dry drops "fall" on the surface and are just sticky/wet enough still to stick. Professionals use a black dry power brushed on with a sponge to do the same trick. Really it can be any color as long as it contrasts well.

You can see I started with black which is most common, but because I had black epoxy under the urethane primer it was making it difficult to know what became a high spot or low spot after sanding so I needed to chose a different color to provide clear contrast.











Here you can see what it looks like when the primer has been sanded, but not enough. Lows still exist and need to be sanded out!

[Fortyseven]

My air lines kept spitting water in the high humidity we've had recently so I built a desiccant from some PVC and 100% silicon cheapo kitty litter. This will ensure I have nice dry air when I spray so I don't get fish-eyes or other issues in my paint. Spraying with any moisture in the lines is very bad.

Silica is also known as silicon dioxide and it is formed from the oxidation of silicon. Silica gel is made from this and has two important properties. One, the gel attracts water molecules and two, the gel has a porous structure making its surface area extreme (800 meters^2/gram). This mean it works extremely well at absorbing water like a sponge. Similar to how activated charcoal filters are, at least on the mechanical side. The carbon also chemically reacts with the gasses so it can do more than silica gel but it's consumed and cannot be reused.

Like a sponge, once it reaches saturation it will no longer absorb any more water. The silica gel doesn't need to be disposed of, one of the neat things about silica gel is you can bake the gel at a little above boiling temperature of water, say 225* or 250*, for a few hours and all the moisture they've adsorbed will evaporate out.

It was fairly cheap (<$20) and easy to make the decadent although I had to turn one of the PVC bushings to fit.





Using a bit of a negative rake on the tool here because of how soft the material is. A neutral or positive rake would dig into the plastic and cut too aggressively. The negative rake prevents it from digging in and making gouges.

[Fortyseven]

Machining some parts for next semesters ISAT 431 lab. Students will be able to learn (hopefully) and use a mix of a variety of industrial equipment to manufacture a clock.

Render of prototype design:



What you see here will be the soft jaws that will hold the clock body for machining. In retrospect I designed them poorly and could of saved a lot of time and work by just making a fixture plate.







Main pieces of the clock.





Machining the prototype clock body.

[Senor_Taylor]

I haven't read this yet, but two things

1) Welcome back!

2) Thank you for this large amount of stuff to read today.

[Fortyseven]

I haven't read this yet, but two things

1) Welcome back!

2) Thank you for this large amount of stuff to read today.

Thanks Taylor. I have been lurking around and it wasn't until I ran into Salar the other day that he encouraged me to post. It's a bit of an picture dump all at once, sorry. This is the last few weeks of work I've been doing this summer and I have a few more pictures to post before I catch up to the present.

[ScottyB]

this is super fascinating and a part of the car world i know absolutely nothing about.

i love how you're like "this isn't show car stuff" and i'm sitting here like, this is going to look awesome what are you talking about?

[Fortyseven]

this is super fascinating and a part of the car world i know absolutely nothing about.

i love how you're like "this isn't show car stuff" and i'm sitting here like, this is going to look awesome what are you talking about?

I took an autobody class my last year in highschool and it didn't go well; the teacher was an old biker guy with a nasty disposition who should never of been hired. He sometimes wouldn't even show up and when he did he'd just stand outside all afternoon smoking cigarettes or locked in his office. One time he just left in the middle of class on his Harley and didn't come back. Much of what I learned was from browsing the restoration forums and so they do everything with perfection. So my knowledge is more along the lines of restorations rather than normal auto body shop techniques.

This is a lot of fun but I don't have the patience to ever do this as a career. It takes a lot of patience and it gets me stressed out when everything takes 10x longer than I estimated.

[Fortyseven]

It's finally ready for the most exciting part. Spraying the actual base coat and clear coat.

First, taping the windows and everything else up. I left a square in the windshield to see through when I drive it to the paint booth. Once I get there I'll finish masking it down.





They say that the key to a good paint job is 90% prep and 10% spraying.

Base coat is on! It naturally looks a little flat, it has no properties to make it glossy. It's pretty much pure black pigment you're seeing. You want to use a tack cloth, which is nothing more than a cheese cloth (waxy/tacky cloth) between each coat to pick up and dust or bugs that might of settled on the surface after it flashed. You always tack except for between clear coats.





Didn't listen to my own advise and sprayed after sunset again meaning the bugs that are attracted to light showed up again. I had to sand out a few dead bugs and spot spray more base on those areas.



Had a run too. The base coat should never have the chance to run so I was spraying it a bit too heavy. Was a simple enough fix though block sanding it back down. Clear coat you want to spray WET so it's much more likely for runs to occur.