Blasted p1800s!

For the last few weeks, the grade 12 class has been diligently working at scraping off all the rubberized undercoating on the car. It was a thankless job, tiring, slow, and frankly, pretty annoying. I was pretty impressed with how they stuck with it and pushed through the pain and suffering.

When the soda blasting guy showed up to see the car for the first time, he commented that we had done a great job getting the ‘stuff’ off. The challenge is that most media will not be able to remove it effectively, and where it blasts off, it will often stick to another close by area... so you can effectively chase it around the car for hours.

The underside of the car pre-blasting...

 ... and after a test to see how things were going to work. It was amazing how fast it was with the right set-up.

There was some concern about the mess and noise, and while it was both messy and noisy - it was not too bad.

We opted not to do the entire car, but the engine bay, the interior, the entire underside and all the seams and any other areas that had rust or repair work that had to be removed, or re-done. If there was good paint adhesion on any of the larger panels, we could scuff sand them ourselves or take them down to bare metal at a later date. 

A detail shot of the seams (click for a larger image).

The underside was the most impressive. There were only a couple of surprises - areas that were a little more rusted that we expected, but for the most part, nothing too major.


In other news, I have started working on planes again - about 15 minutes a day. I was feeling ready to get back at it and figured a very short period of time might be the way to do it. I would work for 15 minutes and regardless of how things felt at the end of that time, I would stop and wait 24 hrs to make sure things were ok. Obviously, if there was any pain, I would stop. I worked most of last week and I have to say it was incredibly rewarding... I had forgotten how much I missed what I had grown so used to doing. It felt great to file again, bend sidewalls and even piening went ok... although I know that is going to be a very challenging task. It may take me several days to pien a shell together, or even longer, but I am going to continue to forge ahead.Thanks to everyone who has called, sent emails, commented on instagram... all the encouragement has been very much appreciated.

I have been posting short videos of this post injury plane build on instagram - here is a link if you want to follow along.