Firewall Replacement (Conversion to Factory Air Con) and Rust Prevention Part 4

Back to the firewall and cowl.

I removed the door nut plates and scoured the rest of the metal areas inside the drain area to prep for sealing paint.

These are the door nut plates for this side.

Next was the first round of POR 15. This was all brush painted on. The goal here is to get the POR 15 into all the seams to seal them. If paint is in there and covering the steel, then oxygen can't get in.

Next up was using the Eastwood's frame coat with a stray. I find this does a slightly better job of covering steel than POR 15. So any gaps left behind I think this does a pretty good job of sealing. Also I used this in the cabin area to seal all the bare steel left from assembly to stop any further corrosion.

It's a terribly messy thankless job. But it must be done if you want to daily drive these cars and reduce the worry about future rusting.

When I was prepping the interior roof structures for this by blowing them out. The old field smell came right back out again. There didn't seem to be any flotsam in the upper rails but that smell brought back some old memories of this turd. This car body has been in this reduced state for quite some time and that smell was still lingering in the cracks and crevices. This should be the end of this smell in this body shell. There's simply no where else for it to hide anymore.

Just to rehash, this is what this car looked and smelled like (if you had smell-a-vision). It was sitting in a field in an Indian Reservation for decades with a broken drivers side window.

You can plainly see the massive under dash evaporator still in the car.

Between the hot desert sun, occasional rain the rodent motel this was you can imagine the smell of this........not good.

This is such a messy job and I really don't see many people, even shops tackling the seam rust. I always seem to see just a spray of paint over all this with no attention to the fine details. Yuppers it's a mess and it's more work to sand all the drips back out for the final top coat in here but I feel it's worth it to have the hidden layer of protection. You have to keep in mind, only the rocker tunnels and some of the rear panels are galvanized, most of the body is not.

Firewall Replacement (Conversion to Factory Air Con) and Rust Prevention Part 5

As you can see everywhere I can I give it a good douching of sealer.

I then gave it another coat of POR 15 in the cowl area favouring heavily the seams.

I'd almost say it's darn near water tight without the seam sealer.

Speaking of which, it will go on next.

Since all this needs time to cure, I decided to start on the HVAC plenums in the interim.

Continued in next post.