Paint and Body Fox Body Painting 101

RaggedGT said:

Don't praise Dave to much- he gets a swelled head-gets half drunk on craft beer and sits smugly in his chair and doesn't update his threads......

lol just kidding Dave

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I'm not updating my thread cause I haven't done anything Chris.

Gonna though.

Remember me talking about getting a hatch, front bumper and a rear bumper? Well, this Friday I'm finally going to pick them up. Takes away the regular spending money. I will buy my p-clips for my brake lines, that's all I'll be able to afford. Poor me! It's almost going to effect my beer budget! Almost.......

In the mean time I'll get the rear end modified and assemble it.

RaggedGT said:

With all this down time waiting for the hatch and such-time that could be put towards mocking up/mounting @90sickfox 's blower on dobys power plant

All kidding aside Dave, you are years ahead of me progress wise and it's only been what-6/8 months? Lol my car is going on two years and is still in pieces on the garage floor

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I've been posting for six months.....

RaggedGT said:

Pretty good guess right? Lol I think I was around for your new guy posts.

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Yep, that silly car of mine has been in progress for a couple of years in reality. I wanted to find a forum because I knew I would eventually have to put it together.

Ok, back to paint and body stuff.

I got a hatch for my '86 GT from a salvage yard, here it is:

First thing to do, especially if it's bad dirty, is to wash it. This one isn't, so next thing is to tear down the panel (disassemble). This part obviously has a wiring harness in it and a spoiler, along with tag lights.

Before you tear down your new panel, take pictures of where wires are routed and where plugs and clips go.

During the tear down, don't be in a rush. Be gentle taking out plugs and nuts and the sort. Have a container to put everything you took off the panel in to. On my hatch, two of the nuts were frozen onto the bolts that attach to the spoiler. I sprayed WD40 on these first after I had removed the plugs from the underside. Even then, they didn't break free. I removed all the nuts that would come off first, then I turned these frozen ones to remove the spoiler from the bolt. They are threaded into the spoiler.

You will want to do these last simply because you'll strip out the spoiler's attachment hole if the spoiler can't move away from the bolt. You can see one of the holes that one of the frozen bolts was attached to in the upper right of the picture.

Once I removed the spoiler and the tag lights, I labeled the different wiring harness' with tape on what they go to. Then I pulled out those two harness' from the left side access hole and labeled and disconnected them from the main harness that runs up the left side of the panel. Then I removed them after I disconnected the ground wires.

You will need to remove the left ball shock mount to remove the wiring harness from the hatch, then you fiddle with the harness until it comes out. It's not very difficult.

Be sure to disconnect the ground wire for the rear window defogger and mark that wire with tape and pen.

With the wires out of the way it's much easier to remove the lock cylinder. Just drill out the rivet holding the cylinder retaining bracket and pop the bracket off. The lock cylinder slides out and Tada! I've disassembled the inside of the tailgate.

Turn the gate over and use a moulding removal tool to take off the trim around the window. The tool just pries out the clip enough to slip it off. Be very gentle with these mouldings if you want to reuse them, they bend up real easy. Bright side, they can be straightened relatively easy if you're patient.

Last thing is the glass, I'm taking it down to our glass guy on Tuesday to have him take it out. I've done several favors for him so he'll do it for nothing. You can remove your own glass if you like, and I might have done it myself except this hatch isn't mounted to the car. It would have taken more patience than I cared to exert to do this off the car.

Time to really inspect your part without any dangling crap in the way. I used a knotted wire wheel on a four inch grinder to remove the old seam sealer so I could see all along the inner panel. As you can see, the lower right inside panel has rotted through.

I'll repair this by replacing the metal with a comparable gauge clean metal.

I'll continue on this tomorrow when I do the repair itself.

Time to cut out the rot.

First thing I did is cut out and shape a strip of the metal and beat it into the desired shape using the existing panel as the template:
Then I cut out the three spot welds in the lip area:
I rolled the lip of the outer panel off of the edge of the rotted area
I used my new piece to draw a line to cut out the rust and used a die grinder to cut it all out:
I cleaned up the rust on the backside of the outer panel and tack welded in the new metal:
Finally, I finished tack welding around the perimeter, ground down the welds and roll the lip back over the edge and tack welded it back at the three cut out spot weld areas.

You'll have to trust me, I did what I said there. The photo won't download for some unknown reason.

I finished for today by spraying the backside with a rust protectant paint.

I'll mud it once I have the glass pulled on Tuesday.

Fair warning if you have a similar problem, when you roll back the outer panel lip, it will cause denting on the edge of the panel on the outside. I knew this would be the case, but this is the best hatch I could get, so I had to fix it.

The repair on the outside is fairly easy to fix, we'll cover that repair this coming week.