Rusty Metal Fixup - Pedal Assembly and Brake Fluid Reservoir Bracket

I was watching a weekend car build/repair show and they talked about this stuff called Metal Rescue.  It's supposed to remove rust from metal parts, bringing it back down to nice metal.  This is different from the rust restorer products which convert and encapsulate the rust into a hard black compound.  I figured it was worth a try because the pedal assembly was a rusty mess.

I bought it in a gallon jug from Summit Racing.  It was significantly cheaper than buying directly from the manufacturer web site.

This is what the pedal assembly looked like at the start.  You can see how hard it would be to sand away all of the rust while assembled, or even after it's torn apart, which is hard to do since some of the parts stay on for good from the factory.

The instructions say to completely immerse the metal in the solution, so I used a 5 gallon bucket.  It wasn't converting quickly so I just left it overnight and checked it in the morning.  It's a pretty interesting product - no toxins, no VOC, water-based.  You just keep using the same solution over and over until it's totally black and won't take off any more rust.

And here's how it looked when I pulled it out.  Excellent results with just some dirt and original paint flecks!

And here is what the solution in the bucket looked like:

I then primed, painted and clear coated the assembly, so I'll be ready to reinstall it at the right time.

The next rusty thing I tried was the brake fluid reservoir bracket.  It's a small piece of shaped metal to hold the reservoir onto its bracket in the cowl area.  Here is what it looked like as it went through the process in a small paint pail.  I decided to put the whole thing into a ziplock bag to see the extent of evaporation.

It removed the rust well, leaving just a bit of original paint.

And this is what the solution looked like afterward.  Yuk!  Liquid rust.

Here's what the bracket looks like back in place after sanding, priming, painting and clearcoating.

I poured all of the solution back into the original container and it went nearly back up to its original level, and was a weak tea color so I think it still has a lot of life left in it.

Day of Destruction - Engine Battery Rack Prep

Before I get to the destruction, I wanted to show the result of prepping and finishing the metal around the interior of the passenger compartment.  If you go back a bit in time, you'll see that the car was caught in the rain with bare metal exposed in the passenger compartment.  I would have thought Rainbow would have blasted, primed and painted the compartment, but it didn't happen.  I had to scrape off most of the existing rubberized coating to expose the rusty parts.  I then treated it with my magic rusty solution.  I then used about 6 cans of 3M rubberized undercoating spray.  Trust me, a can doesn't go very far.  It's basically thinned tar.  I masked off the area, then sprayed multiple coats and I think the final result looks great.  I've dealt with the rust, and added a temperature stabilization and noise reduction layer.

Now, on to the destruction.  During the tear down, I read the EA directions and it said remove the engine cover release bracket so the engine bay battery rack will fit.  So I unbolted the catch mechanism from the mount welded to the rear of the rear engine firewall.  The car was then painted and now I come to realize, with some advice from the helpful folks on the 914EV forum, that I was meant to remove the mount too, and the hard tube that shepherds the release cable from the passenger compartment!  This was going to be ugly, given the delicate nature of removing a welded metal bracket from a newly painted area.  You can see the tube curving in from the right and attaching to the mount.

The tube is very stiff and tack welded to the frame as it comes out of the passenger compartment, so I decided to cut it off, and I'll pop a small rubber cap on later.

Here's a closeup of the mount we need to remove.  I taped off the areas I was likely to bang into for a little protection.  I had to climb inside the engine compartment to get the proper access.

With the use of a sawzall, jigsaw with a metal blade and angle grinder, the mount is now gone.  I painted it with rust fluid and will prime and paint to match the body later.  It came off better than I thought it would.

I tried a test fitting of the battery rack and immediately found the original 12V battery tray needs to be removed too.  I just missed that in the instructions.

I did manage to remove it, with the help of the tools listed above.  I didn't take an after-picture, so I'll put that up later.  The good thing is when I got the tray out, I found a strip of rust under the horizontal tab of metal you can see welded to the vertical panel.  This would have been a rust farm in the future.  They weren't able to reach it with the blaster and the primer and paint couldn't get up underneath well enough.  I slathered it with rust solution and it's in good shape now.

Starting to Build It Back Up Again

Now that the body is back from the shop and I have the first load of electric conversion parts, I can get started on the main event - making an electric car!

Well, I immediately got sidetracked a bit.  When I got the body back from the shop I noticed a small number of points on the body that need to have the paint touched up.  I left the car on the trailer in case Rainbow wanted it back in their shop to do the work.  Now remember I live in an area that gets about 4-6" of rain per year, and it mostly comes between December and February.  Well guess what happened while I was down in LA working on the installation of a monitoring system for my company REC Solar?  It rained.  And the rain got into everything.  Most of the car was OK, but the floor of the passenger compartment wasn't primed and painted, it just had the original coating from the Porsche factory, which is 37 years old and not in the best shape.  It's amazing how quickly the rust stared forming!  I started working on scraping the coating back to clean metal and dry everything out.  When I'm sure it's dry, I'll treat it with the rust converter fluid.  When that's done its work, I'll spray on a new fresh, full new coating of the mystery stuff on the floor.  It seems to be a rubberized undercoating-type compound; I'll check out my options at the auto parts store tomorrow.

I removed the doors and front hood to make sure they don't get scratched during the conversion, and it also gives me greater access to the parts of the car I need to get to.

The pedal mounting area doesn't have a drain hole and the water pooled up nicely.  I had to remove the unit so I can get access to clean and de-rust the area.

Wrapping up Preliminary Body Work

This weekend was spent grinding, sanding, filling, sanding and priming the paint chips and rust spots around the car.  First up is the cowl area on the passenger side that I worked on last weekend.  I dug out the rubber strip that was stuffed in the seam between the fender and the cowl.  It was moderately rusty underneath so I sanded the crack and slathered in Rustoleum.  I then sanded and primed the whole area to prevent new rust forming on the bare metal.

Remember I previously said there were no more Mystery Holes?  Well I found the last two.  They're located at the bottom of the front fender panels, directly below the rusty mess of the cowling.  There's clearly a failure mode of water not draining properly in these areas.  I could see filler and primer in both areas, with a bit of rust poking through.  I dug out the filler and rust down to good metal, sanded, Rustoleum'd, then primed.  With 5 areas needing metalwork, I've come to the conclusion that I'll let a professional shop restore good metal into those places.  I don't want to do all of this work, then fill the gaps full of body filler, which is I think what happened previously and got us into the situation we are now.  I'll let them work on welding new metal into place, then apply some super-rust preventive technology.

Here's the driver's side before and after:

 

and here's the passenger side:

I also did several surface rust spots and paint chips around the car, wrapping up what I can see of the bodywork.  Here she is in all of her glory, covered with paint masking paper.  I'll let the primer cure and spray with silver paint next weekend.  This is not the final painting, just a temporary coat to get me through the rest of the restoration.  In the course of getting to this point, I've removed a bunch of trim chrome and rubber.  I'll get recommendations on restoration and painting shops, then talk to them about the project and what they need me to do to the car to optimize the process.

First Body Work

I have no experience with doing bodywork on cars, but I do have a *lot* of experience shaping and finishing wood, so how hard could it be?  Ha!

So, off to Kragen Auto Parts to get a bunch of wet/dry sandpaper, sanding blocks, body filler and spatulas.  I decided to start with a surface rust/paint chip area just behind the driver's door.  It had been worked on before but needed to be re-done from scratch.  I put my wire wheel in my drill and ground away the old filler and rust, down to clean metal.  Then I mixed the filler and spread it on with a wide spatula.  I let it dry overnight and then sanded from coarse to 2000 grit.  The filler seemed to have some tiny air bubbles in it, so I mixed another small amount of filler and just topped it off.  Another overnight dry, then sanded to 2000.  I masked it off and sprayed primer and then a closely-matching silver top-coat.  I'm not worried about an exact match because I'll have the whole car painted when I get everything ready.  I have no idea why this blog software keeps rotating the picture...!  Argh.

With that under my belt, I attacked the trailing edge of the driver's door that had significant rust on the bend and even on the inside edge.  I used the wire wheel to grind off all of the rust down to bare metal.

I then did the filler and sanding thing again, with great results.  I must be getting better at mixing the filler because I didn't have any air bubbles.  I then sprayed primer and silver top-coat and it looks great.  Now only another 20 or so areas to fix up.