Stripping and Painting

This week has been really productive on the MattMobile front! Not only has Bo been working like a man possessed on the suspension, but I too have been contributing in my own little ways.

With the suspension being pulled apart not only to put in the airbags, but also to switch out the bushings, Bo took the opportunity to sand blast a few parts and paint them. I must confess, they looked really amazing. Though I was originally TOTALLY against doing work that would not directly contribute to the drivability of the car, Bo has convinced me that there's some wisdom to doing some cosmetic work to the internals of the car. With those arms and bushings looking so nice, I want the other parts to match. To that end, I've taken to cleaning off all of the collected gunk on parts of the frame, and painting it over.

Bo has recommended a product by Krylon, their BBQ paint. Not only is it designed to withstand high temperatures, but it also dries very quickly, and leaves a nice matte finish. Granted, this is not a show quality paint or anything like that. The main purpose really is to just do an above amature clean up of the frame. A lot of builders use a POR product on their frame, but because I am so lacking in rust, I figured that would be overkill.

Here's the stuff I picked up today to get this operation underway. Some Krylon paint from ACE Hardware, a wire brush attachment for my grinder, and some brake cleaning spray, to blast off those tenacious greasy bits.

This is the first piece I decided to tackle. I used a couple wire brush bits for my drill, and knocked off all of the dirt and grime. Bo tells me that there's no need to scrape it down to the metal, the point is just to clean it up a little.

Once painted with the BBQ spray, it looks just great!

I was very inspired by the great results I got from the bar, so I set my sights on something a little more complicated, the back side of the rear support wall thingie. Because it's not entirely flat, and is a little hard to get at in a few places, this went much more slowly. I did get a chance to finally use my new DeWalt grinder, which made EXTREMELY short work of the gunk. I was pretty impressed!

In other news, my neighbor dropped off a few bottles of Tequila. If you have a grocery store near you, see if you can find some of this stuff. It's super reasonably priced, and according to everyone has tasted it at my party, it is a very nice tequila. They are not a sponsor of this project or anything, but I wanted to give them a shout out here as it is darn good stuff.

Tomorrow I won't be doing any MattMobile work, as I am helping some friends out on a shoot. More on that later, but for now, I will let you know that I think it'll be a great learning experience for me, and I plan on picking up a bunch of tips that I can use on my own videos.