72 TA : New Project

[njsteve]

While I was at the shop I grabbed one of the rear wheel flairs to see if there was a better way to strip them than media blasting. Since they are ABS plastic I ended up using the old purple stuff in a tub. There was a ton of paint on the flair so it took about 5 days of soaking and scrubbing with a bristle brush to get the majority of the paint layers off. It worked rather well. Some fine sanding will get the remainder of the yellow primer/filler off. The plastic is actually a white color that is very close to Cameo White. I don't really know, but these may have come unpainted from the factory since the color is so close. Anyone know?

Heres the before shot with the white rubber welting covered in paint and cracking:







It is interesting to see that the factory used a big staple to hold on the upper end of the welting onto the plastic flair due to the severe angle it has to maintain.

[njsteve]

I started out with a small bucket:



And then graduated to one of the tubs that my wife uses to store the Christmas decorations:



Here is the removed welting next to the NOS piece that I took off of the NOS front spoiler. Big difference after all these years. The NOS stuff is very flexible. Unfortunately the repro stuff is made only in grey and you have to paint it or dye it.




Here's how it looks after 5 days:

[njsteve]

Once I got it all cleaned I found a couple stress cracks in the plastic:







I pulled out the trusty plastic welder and used that to heat up and massage/melt the original material into the cracks thereby repairing the areas.






Of course things look uglier before they get prettier...

[njsteve]

After a few minutes cooling down I sanded the area with a mini-orbital sander and 180 grit. Once that was finished, the area is just as strong as the rest of the flair:

[Norwood]

Yes back in the day, they were molded in body color. That plastic welder looks like the trick to fixxing these. NICE
The welting takes paint with flex very well.

[Johnny Horsepower]

I love this thread! and I wanna buy Steve's car when he sells it

[njsteve]

Note to self: when you borrow one of the wife's storage tubs make sure there is not a hairline crack in the bottom that drains out 5 gallons of very expensive cleaning solvent onto work bench/old pool table which then leaks onto rug under said work bench/pool table. Because you will have to clean up the entire mess and then discover that rugs soaked in Purple Stuff overnight do an amazing job at completely sanitizing one 6'x12' area of all dirt, grease, oil, paint, etc. Now wife wants the rest of basement floor cleaned to match the bright grey rectangle.

Before:



After:

[Xplantdad]

Leave it up to you, Steve...to find yet another use for the cleaning solvent!

[njsteve]

Yeah, I think that's a record or something: that is the first time I have actually used something for it's intended purpose, unintentionally of course.

[njsteve]

It took several days of soaking to get all of the white paint off of the other flares. The purple stuff doesn't seem to touch primer-surfacer layers so that took a lot of 80 grit sandpaper and a Black&Decker Mouse sounder. That stuff is hard as rock. That is the reason the flares still have a yellowish tint to the white plastic. I had to get most of that layer off to see where the stress cracks were. I also found some more serious cracks from impact damage on one of the flares.

Here is a close up of one of the stress cracks in the lower front spoiler:



I ended up fixing these by using the plastic welder and smearing at across the cracks perpendicular to the direction of the crack. This melted the plastic back together. It took a while to get all the cracks welded up.

The marks in the lower portion of the flare are from the stress crack remelting process.



The black spots are where I used black ABS plastic rod to weld the majpr impact damage cracks back to gether. Once it cools it is sanded down with 80 grit.