Most of the work is in the video itself. I had the Clausingup on Ebay. It sold but the buyer didn't pay, so I took it as a sign that maybe I should keep it. Then a few weeks later, while trying to make room, I suddenlt put the South Bend 9A up on Craigslist. It sold the next day for a grand. Pretty fair price, I think. It was clapped out in some respects, but very nice in others. Plus it was so well-tooled.
Since then I've doubled down on the Clausing, getting the collet closer to work, tightening up the gibs.
TL;DR If your sequence is 29.94fps, trying copying and pasting your sequence into a new 30pfs. Export as H264.
While trying to airdrop a 1 minute clip, I repeatedly received the message:
Airdrop can be fussy. I'm not alone, so yes other people are trying to figure this out too, but I also don't want to watch a 10 minute video on how to fix it.
So here's my answer: the native format for my camera is 29.97fps, and I think iPhones "like" 30fps. (I think they can play all sort of formats- Filmic Pro can record at 24fps and the iPhone handles this fine.)
I had no luck importing this 29.97 QT clip into Quicktime Player then re-exporting. One alternative solution was to create a new sequence in Premiere that is H264 and 30fps instead of 29.97. Then drop the existing sequence into that new sequence, forcing it to conform to the adjusted rate. Then try making another export using H264 format, and use 'Match Source' as a preset. This file was 84mb, and went to the iPhone via airdrop without any other conversion hassles.
Without a doubt, the big project of the last few months was selling the Cessna 170 and moving out of the hangar. This took literally months. I owned the airplane for about 15 years, and I felt like it was a long chapter that needed to finally end- the plane needed to move on to someone else. I also wanted to lower my expenses, simplify things and take a break fo General Aviation. I'd like to move to an IFR-equipped, 200mph airplane someday, but right now, I think this is a good thing. Honestly, selling the plane was the easiest part of the journey. I had been accumulating stuff for longer than I owned the plane, and the hangar was always an easy place to just store stuff that I wasn't using but I didn't want to let go of. It was always the answer that was too easy: "I'll just put it down inthe hangar." So, it took quite a while to get rid of all this years of accumulation. I must have done 30 Craigslist transactions and nearly as many Ebay sales. I sold a 4X5 view camera kit with 3 lenses. A Voigtlander R2 camera. A complete 4X5 darkroom including a Beseler 4X5 enlarger, 2 cold light heads, 18 trays, chemistry containers... giant flat files full of art, airplane parts, car parts, the Okamoto surface grinder (yes, it went to a machinist in San Pedro for about a grand), tool carts, tools, sheets of foam, a hydraulic press. The bug body and all the associated parts, desks, chairs, thousands of photographs and drawings. Even the pallet racking is gone, as is the wood from the overhead loft I built between the two rack towers. What I needed to hang on to I moved to a small 10X10X10 storage unit in Carson. This dropped my monthly expenses from, I'd guess about $1000 per month ($600 hangar, airplane insurance, annual inspection, operating costs, foreflight, etc) down to $200 for the storage unit. I'm hoping to eventually get rid of that too. Sooooo many trips to the dump, to goodwill, to the house...I thought it would never end. But as of today, I removed the padlock, the space is empty, and I no longer pay rent there. It's liberating.
No my focus is on home, on family, and reorganizing the garage shop, and the languishing project that is the Volkswagen bug. I think I may have found someone to bring the body to, and that's a small breakthrough in itself. A guy in Wilmington that wants to do it quickly- not keep it for a 'minimum of 1 year' as another perfectionist guy wanted to do. I just need a good driver. I cut up the 67 body, and took the dash out of it. The '64 body has a large hole where the gauge cluster is supposed to go. Tragic...
Next are the quarter panels. I'm trying to retrieve as large and intact sections as I can manage. There is an amazing thread of thesamba.com of this dude in Florida doing his own work on his bug, and it's just amazing seeing how he does it.
I hope this doesn't turn into a dead link- he seems to have lost some momentum over the last few months. But watching how he removes panels by grinding the spot welds away, then seeing his careful fitting and tig work... it's just masterful... very inspiring. I thought- "Oh, I'll do that!". It really made me feel ok to start cutting body panels instead of fretting about it. So I started grinding the front sill spots rivets away from the dash piece. Let me tell you, it's exhausting. I went immediately the "what the hell was I thinking?" place. I go there a lot with this particular project, which has now expanded like some car-parts-kaleidoscope. Now that I'm committed to having all the parts in and around my garage, it has completely overwhelmed the space.
Adding to the mayhem, I impulsively put the Clausing 5914 lathe up on Ebay. I just had enough of it taking up so much space and never quite coming together. then, of course, as it was up for sale, I started putting it together. Not only getting a new leadscrew shear pin back in place (which is, like, everything if you want to actually use it) but I was so disappointed in the performance, I bit the bullet on changing the motor drive pulley diameter- I went from 24 teeth to 18, I think. and that made a huge difference in usability and torque. This was all happening while it was up on Ebay. There is nothing that will get the weird dudes out and stalking you than putting a decent American lathe up for sale. This one guy from Texas stalked my via craigslist, found my email and got my number, then talked my ear off for over and hour. All they want is the same thing- they want you to take the machine off the listing and sell it to them directly. Of course, Ebay very much frowns on all that.
Here is a short video I made that acts as a sort of sales pitch for it:
As I got it ready for the auction close and eventual pickup, I kept fiddling with it. I installed the Royal collet closer. It had been sitting for years- I never installed it. What a sweet piece of kit that thing is. So satisfying to operate and dial it in (Joe Piecynski has a great video on refining the bearings and mounts to reduce clatter and noise). In any case, by the time the auction was halfway through, I was like, 'Damn. I don't want to sell this now.' The clincher was an exchange I had with Ryan Kalamers- a fellow in Northern California who has completed a stunning restoration of his 5914. He convinced me that the lathe was so close to getting dialed in. I have a small leak from the headstock which he thinks is not a big deal to fix (he's been all through his own headstock so I'm inclined to believe him on this.) His own machine had been crashed so hard that the chuck was seized, the spindle bent and the T-nut slot was bent upward. After all that, he is now a hug fan of his machine. All this made me regret putting it up on Ebay.
So, somewhat fortuitously, some mystery no-name bidder with like 2 transactions in their history won the auction. For $1900. Less than I had expected, honestly. But no call or message came. I opened the 'unpaid item' case. Still nothing. The case finally closed and now I'm just thinking I will keep it after all.
This car was advertised as being a real creampuff and 'everything works'. It was an auction on Ebay, and I was told I got a 'really good deal' when I went to pick it up. Well I can say in retrospect, I will never buy a car on Ebay again. I knew from the first moment as the hood hinges started binding up- that was not a good sign, and was a strong indicator of the rest of the car's condition. These receiver holes trays in the engine compartment tend to collect debris and rust out. The holes disintegrate and new sheet metal is welded in. That was the case on this car. Not a good sign- and very much a signal that maintenance just dropped off at some point for maybe 20 years? I managed to retrieve the retainer clip way down in the depths of the tray, lube everything up, do a little bending and cajoling, and for now it seems to be ok.
There are nice things about it. I mean,the repaint is ok, and the plastic surrounds for the headlights were obviously replaced. So the car presents pretty well from the front. It certainly isn't a beater, but it's been neglected for sure. These sellers think that if the A/C works, you will be so blinded by amazingness that everything else will be forgotten.
It started well, but on the drive home the shifts were hard and way off, then steering was loose, the brakes were firm but ok. It also idled poorly and didn't have much power.
The first thing I did was go after the shifter bushings. I realized pretty quickly that the linkage wasn't the real problem, it was the connection of the arm to the shaft on the transmission itself- the pinch bolt was loose. Just that one little thing made the car a lot easier to accept. I did replace the bushings, then I looked at the accelerator linkage. The plastic ball bushing on the firewall was disintegrated and I made another one out of Delrin on the lathe the night I got it home. Now at least I have something closer to full throttle. I think there's more to do on that linkage but things improved.
Next was a valve adjustment. I ordered the special wrenches from a guy on Ebay. He was just buying a couple craftsman 13mm wrenches, heating them up and bending them into the shape that makes it easy to get them in place. Then as I used them, it becomes clear that one is ground with a thinner profile than the other, and there can really only be one way they are applied to the adjustment nuts.
I think out of the 10 valves, maybe 7 of them were very tight. This makes sense that they get pulled up against the seats by the strength of the springs. The cam lob comes around and pushes the valve down and opens it. But as they keep getting pulled against those valve seats, the valve closes up the .1mm clearance and eventually stays just a little bit open all the time, which obviously is not what you want it to do- that's not compression. This resulted in a huge improvement in performance. I'm also assuming that the adjustment was put off for some time, carbon builds up on valve and seat, so a good robust Italian tune-up and another adjustment should make it run even better. I already notice less smoke so I think the valves are seating better as we go...
I'm taking the approach of not overdoing it like it did with the bug (did a complete pan-off disassembly, the car shows no signs of going back together after 3 years). I'm doing a more surgical adjust and run, adjust and run approach. This is actually working pretty well, and Mercedes seems to reward this. I also am just amazing at the detail and expertise in the forums- the PeachParts forum and the Benz World forums are both great.
My next issue is vacuum. I'm only getting about 10 inches of vacuum right off the main line, and it's very erratic. Should be 20 inches, and with the pump and check valves working properly, the reading should be smoother, or I assume so. Whatever the cause of the low vacuum is, some previous owner decided to plug the lines into the firewall with a tiny screw in the X-connector. Took me some time to figure this out but I knew something was up because the door locks, gas door and trunk locks were all completely dead. I took that screw out and immediately everything worked again.
This is what I mean when I say the care was misrepresented. Once you've paid for it on Ebay, it's awkward to roll up in person and say hey this isn't what you said it was. It's not even close to being a fully sorted car, but there's a part of me that really enjoys sorting it out.
My next vacuum targets are the pump itself (got a used on on Ebay for not much) the check valve right a the the pump (just replaced it this evening- haven't fully tested it yet) the main line going to the brake booster (the smaller 1/8' size taps are all trashed and nobody makes this part any more. I'm going to try tapping and replacing the little barbed ends with brass versions. I might end up buying one used but they are getting expensive. Between the pump and the brake booster, I should be able to get the pressure back up to a healthy number again. Once I have that baseline pressure, I think a lot of other things will fall into place- the shifting, the brake feel, the power band for acceleration...
Care is coming up on exactly 200,000 miles. Good time to go through all this...
Things I've done:
Lubricated and adjusted hood hinges. The Rebuild and lube the driver door master lock valve (didn't really need it tho). I drilled out the end and disassembled it. The rubber rings could use replacement.
Adjusted valves and replaced valve gasket. No leaks.
Changed both fuel filters
changed engine oil, removed and replaced oil filter
replaced dead washer pump, cleaned washer fluid reservoir
removed battery and battery tray, cleaned up, painted and reinstalled. Cleaned battery terminals and added dialectric grease to leads and posts
removed tach amplifier and stripped silicone from solder joints
I keep collecting these things. I have 10 of them. One of them I bought in Arizona in the 1990s. The others I just keep picking up on Ebay for dirt cheap. I've never done a Clean Lubricate & Adjust (CLA) before. I thought, let me open the roughest of them- the one covered with duct tape residue and it doesn't close properly.
It's definitely daunting but there is some good guidance on the web. When you take the bottom cover off, a little piece immediately comes out of the camera if it's not perfectly inverted- that is the film rewind button. It's easy to see where it belongs once you put it in its hole the bottom cover again.
Same thing happens when you remove the top cover: There is a tiny cylindrical plunger that transmits the downward motion to the shutter release for when a cable release is installed.
The diopter on the back was so tightly installed, I decided to make a lens wrench to get it off the eyepiece. I really wanted to steal it for another better functioning body, but now I've become obsessed with getting it off without destroying it.
This is serial number 3823902
outside diameter of diopter is .947
inner diameter of eyepiece (inside top cover) .786
0.547 (box long dimension) 0.375 (short dimension)
Someone appears to have put this on with epoxy. Even with all the gripping power of the the wrench, it took tremendous effort to get this loose.
Next idea is toe make some battery holders so I can install an LR44 or Duracell 357 battery in there. The Older Nikkormats take a PX625 mercury cell that runs at 1.3 - 1.4 volts. Nobody uses these any more. There are Wein zinc-air cells you can buy but I think the better path is to install a tiny aluminum case to make up for the smaller diameter, and put a little diode in the line to lower the voltage to about 1.4v.
I've been putting more time into all the projects.
The bug pan painting is finally finished and the pan is back in the garage.
The Devilbiss gun worked well. Not quite the finish I would have liked, but good enough for the unseen bottom of a car. There are some nagging details about the air pressure that I never was able to get figured out- like when I release the trigger on the gun, there is an instant, higher level exit- pshhhh of air that, within about a second, settles into a lower pressure which stabilizes. Instead of a constant flow that's on or off, I get this ramping down effect. Also I never quite believed the indicated air pressure at the gun gauge. You're supposed to measure when the trigger is pulled, but the number was always way lower- like 12psi, when I'm pretty sure the gun was at something more like 25 or even 30. So in the end I just used my ears and what felt right in terms of material making its way onto the surface and how wet or dry that was. I gotta say I'm a lot less excited about it all in retrospect. I get super stressed out the moment I open the cans and start mixing. I know there's a time limit that's far longer than I'm going to use, but something about wearing the full face respirator, the compressor trying to keep up, the toxicity of the materials, the constant threat of dust and bugs and how many ways it can all go wrong. I wish I could enjoy it all more.
I added another overhead fluorescent fixture which made a huge difference in the Millrite corner.
I threw together some soft jaw covers for my cheap vise, and finally fixed the handle ferrules with CRS round stock and setscrews.
I bolted the front beam on and now I'm working on a special tool to compress the rear suspension on the Volkswagen. It's a shop tool that looks very nice and very expensive and rare- like made by Stahlwille. It's a threaded rod-type thing but at my basic level, I think something I could easily make. So I started to. It felt good. I used the 4X6 saw. I used the Millrite to carve out a semicircle in a bracket.
Then threw the steel round stock on the South Bend 9A to turn a boss end to weld to. I busted out the welder and buzzed it together. I was on a roll.
Next I went back to the Millrite to drill a couple holes. I grabbed a 5/8 collet and I got stopped cold by the finicky old collet drawbar that I've always wondered how to get out of the machine. It's a "captured' drawbar, which, no matter what I did, never seemed to reveal how it was going to come out of there. I had a bad habit of being unable to grab certain collets, and also seemed unable to push them out again. I will go into more detail in another post about this. I'm getting more and more into the Millrite. I'd like to go into the spindle, but I know if I crack open that machine, I'll have a Clausing in pieces, a Millrite in pieces, an Okamoto grinder in pieces (see video above) and as of this evening, I'll also have a South Bend 9A in pieces as I'll get to in a minute. But I finally figured out how to get that drawbar out of there. It looked like this:
After putting the surface grinder back together, I had some success in actually grinding something. Just a small block of cold rolled steel. It was far from perfect though. And this is the part where you have to graduate from just taking something apart, cleaning it and putting it back together. Now it's more about the details. As Charles Eames said, "The details are not details, they make the design.".
Right away I noticed that the finish had little repetitive marks in it. Tried a couple different wheels. The first wheel was a Norton 32A46-JVBE.
This was recommended by some experienced folks on Practical Machinist as a good all around wheel. It's a purple wheel. a 46 grit wheel. (Newbie mistake is trying a wheel with too fine a grit). This is, I'd say medium, or medium fine. The J is hardness. (A is super soft and Z is super hard, so, right in the middle).
I also tried a completely different wheel. Another Norton. 39C60-IVK. This is a silicon carbide wheel. In a long and detailed journey of Instagram posts, I watched Spencer Webb bring a gorgeous Brown & Sharpe Micromaster 618 surface grinder up to a very high level of precision and performance. This machine is at a whole other level than my dinky little manual machine. He was struggling with grinding the cast iron table surface itself, as well as the magnetic chuck. This is done to true up the table surface to the plane the machine's own travel. Robin Renzetti recommended: "Cast iron likes green silicon carbide wheels. That Ruby wheel is never going to be happy. Once you try the green silicn carbide you're going to go wow can't believe the difference."
A few posts later he posted the results which were remarkable refined. So with the softer, cold-rolled steel block I was using as a test, I tried that wheel too. Didn't make much of a difference. This is all detailed in the video, but when I finally measured the runout of the tapered spindle mount, I found that it had about half a tenth out at the end. And if that's there, then the plate that is the grinding wheel or diamond wheel or whatever, will be wobbling. I would like to try dressing the wheel on all sides next- to completely cancel out the angualr variation to see if that makes any difference. I could live with it but I would prefer not to struggle with shims and always dressing out the wobble. So of course now I'm obsessively looking for replacement spindles on ebay. I'm looking up spindle repair places all over the country. At some point I think I will be pulling the spindle but now now.
Believe it or not, the priority is the Clausing 5914. I decided to go after the tailstock. Something not very glamorous about that, but when I think of all the little things I make on the South Bend, I realize I use the tailstock ALLLLLL the time. It has a ridiculously short travel (like 2 inches, max) but I am drilling and boring all kinds of things. So having a tailstock that works is such a critical part of what a lathe can do. The thing that made it click was accepting the clapped-out sag in the bed and compensating for it with shims so I could drill on center: truly on center. So it works quite well now.
Everything on this machine is so gunked up with coolant and swarf. It a couple days of scrubbing and waiting for paint remover to do its thing but I got it all stripped. Randy Richard in the Shop has one of these lathes and he's gone through it in a nice detailed YT video.
I had the exact same issue: the brass alignment key was as loose as the one on his machine. So making a new one helped. But the headstock itself appears to be bell-mouthed by quite a bit. Fixing this would be a very involved job that I'm not up for at all. At least not right now. But another Clausing owner on Instagram suggested I take a look at Stefan Gotteswinter's tailstock on his little Chinese lathe. Stefan completely reengineered the tailstock with a drill press-style capstan / rack & pinion quill. It's bold and brilliant and makes it look effortless, like everything he does. That would be a cool mod, but again, I'm not doing that either. What the IG user was pointing me to was the quill lock. It's a clamping collar that sits out at the forward end of the tailstock. It's a flexure that is secured on only one side, and tightens with a lockscrew handle on the other, and it's bored to a very close fit on the quill. This does two things very well: when you want to lock the quill it very firmly locks it with no side deflection, but also, no matter how worn out of imprecise the tailstock bore is, this collar resets the fit of the quill in the tailstock to be very tight again. So this is what I intend to do.
Apparently this is based on his observation of the Haas TL-1 lathe. You see these kind flexure collars on his mill as well. They are something I would like to get more experience in making and using.
Last bit of news is that I was polishing the end of a homemade crank handle for the Clausing's tailstock. I was running the lathe at a very high RPM. Must have oil starved it, because all of a sudden the spindle seized. This is not a new thing. I've had that thing apart before but this time I think it's gotten worse. It's terribly galled and scored in there. I had bought another tailstock and spindle about a year ago for not very much money. I was bluing the spindle and thinking I was going to get a new machine, basically. But the new spindle seemed to run so roughly in the new headstock. I thought, why am I doing this. Just clean it, but the thing back together and run it. So I did, and I put the newer headstock parts away. Yesterday when the lathe seized up, started thinking about what I would do. And I was getting sick of being surrounded by old worn out machine tools. The Millrite is far from perfect. The Clausing is in pieces and it's basically a clean, worn out lathe instead of a filthy, worn-out lathe. The South Bend is a worn out lathe which was now stuck. And the surface grinder is just messed up enough to make me think it might be better to get rid of if. Earlier this evening I went out to the shop and take a look at the "new" headstock and spindle. The new one is the segmented bearing journal type- supposedly the the best version they did. The spindle is hardened- remarkably so compared to the one from my original lathe. I assembled the parts again. This time I stopped messing around with bluing and checking fits. I poured Velocite in all the oil holes. It still needs felts but I think I might actually have a solid assembly there. It ran smooth. And I think it just needs to be run in and kept clean. So I ordered the felts tonight and the South Bend might live again.
I've been watching for grinders and lathes for weeks on Craigslist. Just obsessively... constantly. Every day, several times a day. This truly is a waste of time. But one thing is clear. If you're scanning that much, you see deals. Like a late model South Bend Heavy 10, well-equipped for a thousand bucks in San Diego. Was gone within hours. Or a Boyar-Schultz surface grinder in Torrance, right near me, for $350. Missing a guard but otherwise all there. Another one was a Harig 612 for 500 bucks. That one I could have gotten but.. I already have a surface grinder. Also for sale, from that same seller, were boxes and boxes of grinding wheels. This I thought worth considering. It was up in Van Nuys. After what seemed like 10 rounds of phone tag, the Craigslist gods smiled and I found myself walking into a make space just off the 16R runway by the Van Nuys airport. There were diamond wheels in there, lots of other types but I didn't really know. Lots of new wheels. I thought asking for the entire lot was best. I offered $100. Then $200. Then the seller conferenced with her boyfriend, off site. $250 was the reply. I could live with that.
After taking a casual inventory when I got home, I think I did quite well. It works out to about $1 per wheel. About a third are unused: new in boxes. The majority of the rest are used but still usable. I don't think I'll ever have to buy a grinding wheel again.
It was interesting to see how extensive the custom dressing was in most of the wheels. Very thin profiles, some were delicate rings only a millimeter thick.
The seller never set up the grinder or used the wheels, but the previous owner was a deceased machinist living in Ojai. He also had an EDM machine.
Carborundum AA46-H8-V40 (8)
Carborundum AA100-K5-V40 (4)
Carborundum A46-O6-V30
Carborundum AA46-K8-V40 (1)
Carborundum AA100 K8 V40 (7)
Carborundum PA60-G8-V40 (2)
Carborundum AA60-H8-V40 (3)
Carborundum DA60-H9-V20 (2)
Carborundum AA80-J5-V40 (2)
Carborundum AA100-L5-V40
Carborundum AA100-J5-V40 (4)
Carborundum AA100-K5-V40 (2)
Carborundum Electrite 99 46H (Czecho-Slovakia)
Carborundum Electrite unknown Czecho-Slovakia
Bay State Abrasives 9A 46 K5 V52 (2)
Bay State Abrasives 9A 46 G8 V52 (4)
Bay State Abrasives 17A 46 J5 V52 (2)
Bay State Abrasives 9A 46 J8 V52 (4)
Bay State Abrasives 9A 80 J8 V52 (2)
Bay State Abrasives 9A 120 L8 V22
Bay State Abrasives 9A 120 K8 V52 (9)
Bay State Abrasives unknown
Bay State Abrasives 9A 80 J8 V52
Bay State Abrasives unknown (1)
Norton unknown (4)
Norton 32A46-H8VBE (8) Aluminum Oxide 80 grit, soft vitrified. Often named a good general purpose dry grindingwheel
Norton 32A46-H8VSE (1)
Norton 32A46-I8VBE (4)
Norton 32A46-J5VBE (1)
Norton 38A80-J8VBE (3)
Norton 32A80-H8VBE (2)
Norton 32A60-I8VBE (1)
Norton 32A100-H8VBE (3)
Norton 39C60-IVK (2) 60 Grit Silicon Carbide green wheel
Norton 32A120-J8VBE White wheel, no longer made. 120 grit Aluminum Oxide
Had a couple hours to myself so I thought I'd bite the bullet and try painting the pan. Kind of a disaster. There are so many variables and I so many of them are still weak links. First, the compressor. Its an Ingersoll Rand SS3L3. It does ok. 10.3 CFM, and as I mentioned earlier it barely keeps up with a media blaster. But for spraying, it does pretty well. Moisture is a fairly important issue with compressed air and painting. When a compressor pulls air into itself, it pulls water vapor in along with it. When pushes air out of the pump through a copper line into the tank, it expands and cools. This cooling condenses that water vapor. This condensation is now stuck in the system. It collects in the bottom of the tank, and compressors typically have a drain at the base to let this water out. Some have automatic drains. (I don't). Other systems use a compressor air dryer- basically a closed A/C dehumidifier the removes the water vapor before it even enters the system. They are expensive. I'd assume that a professional body shop would always have this and they'd be crazy to not have it. I don't have one. I'm thinking of maybe getting this budget Harbor Freight unit that is used on Craigslist right now.
Aside from pre-drying the air, or draining the moisture from the bottom of the compressor, you can also add dryers and filters after the compressor. I have a filter/dryer.
This is a cheap unit ($59.99) from Harbor Freight that holds desiccant granules. This thing is actually doing something in my case, but if the compressor runs a lot, it overwhelms the dryer and you can see the moisture making it out to the end of the lines when you're doing something like, say, sandblasting. There are also little inline filters that you can put right under the paint gun as a last ditch effort to remove water.
This cleaning up and drying of the supplied air is something I don't see much discussion about when you watch experts reviewing paint guns in the YouTube videos, but it seems to be as critical a part of the system as gun choice, pressure adjustment, mixing the paint or cleaning and prepping the surface.
Over the years I've gone through several paint guns...
A classic Binks-style siphon-feed gun I bought 20 years ago. When it was new, it actually wasn't bad. I think my fried Roman primed another '67 bug pan for me all those years ago in a garage in Point Richmond using this gun.
Devilbiss Finishline FLG-2 HVLP from the mid-2000s. This was the first higher quality gun I ever bought and the first time I ever saw a disposable cup system which I bought at the same time. Years later, I still have all the functioning pieces of and I use it. I think it's a 3M PPS system and it works quite well. This Finishline gun was wonderful for a good while. I painted the first bug pan with it, as well as a BSA motorcycle frame with great results. Lately though, some clogging developed internally that makes it spray asymmetrically- so bad that it sprays against the side of its own fluid tip and splattered everywhere. I threw it out a few days ago in frustration.
Sata Minijet 3. This is a spot repair gun that I used once years ago then never used again until just this weekend. It's like a little European sports car and oozes quality.
Neiko 31216A gun with a 2.0mm tip for spraying primer. This was 40 bucks from Amazon. This is a cheap primer gun and probably a copy of some other brand name piece.
It's heavy and has a kind of cool black chrome finish, so when you pick it up it feels like high quality... at first. It comes with a multiple size wrench tool which fits exactly zero of the fittings. If you remove the air cap and try to unscrew the fluid tip it take tremendous force. This is common complaint of ultra-cheap Harbor Freight guns. When you finally get it off, it appears that the tip is glued in place. This appears to be a way to seal the gun but obviously it makes it near impossible to clean. When you inspect the machining of the internals surfaces, they are rough and unfinished. So far I have not had much luck with but it's not over yet...
Devilbiss Finishline 4 FLG670. This is the successor to the FLG2, obviously. Has not arrived yet but I have high hopes.
The bug pan has been an uphill battle with it comes to paint. Trying to spray prime on the front axle beam, then later on the pan, the primer was so thick that it was like a textured finish. Almost like orange peel on steroids. I sanded this out.
On the bottom, which was rusting so fast I could almost sit there and watch it, was painted with a very expensive etching primer from PPG. This is intended to go over bare metal, and have a very light film thickness. It's called PPG SX1071 OneChoice Etching Primer. If it builds up too much, it won't dry. It will stay tacky and sticky for hours. It's a weird one and I don't think I'll use it again.
Last weekend I decided to just go for it and spray the single-stage gloss black. This did NOT go well. First of all, the paint is a single stage urethane. It's a PPG product. It's called DelFleet Essentials Single Stage Enamel or ESSS (acronym doesn't quite make sense, I know). It's not a basecoat intended to be covered with a clear coat. It's intended for repainting truck fleets, forklifts, trailers, that sort of thing. It's basically a simple gloss black paint with the durability and toughness of proper 2K car paint, so it appears to have a following with car restorers because that single stage enamel is how cars were painted 40-60 years ago. When I finally got the area set up and the paint mixed, my old Devilbiss FLG2 gun was clogging immediately. I busted out the old siphon gun. That wasn't much better, spraying in uneven spurts but I made the best of it. I still had half a pint of black mixed up and I was super bummed. I remembered I have one more spray gun! I pulled out the Sata Minijet and filled it up. That at least put down a proper coat, but the orange peel texture is some of the worst I've seen. So, lots to learn here. it's drying out too fast before it hits the surface.
Looking at guidance for how to paint properly, I had seen many references to reducers but I never understood what the deal was. Slow reducers, medium or fast. To me this was paint thinner, essentially. So why would I want to thin out such expensive, high quality paints? At Stevenson's in Carson, I asked about the thick milkshake of grey primer I was using on the pan and the results I was getting. He said, "It will spray on kind of like stucco if you don't add reducer to it." Ah-HA! So I wasn't crazy. That's exactly how it sprayed. Not like how I remembered PPG's DPLF primer to be, which was so smooth. In the fine print about mixing ratios, this other primer specifies the option of adding reducers, up to 15%. So now I know one more detail. This is a paint that has to be reduced to flow out properly. So that is my next project: figuring out what effect exactly the reducers have on either primers or the single stage black that I am painting the chassis with.
All in all, I am NOT happy with this. At a distance it looks ok, and yes, it will be covered with carpets and seats and it's not really a visible part of the car. But this is my test bed for getting this right. If you look closely at the frame head on the lower left, you can see how excessive the orange peel is, and the coverage is so uneven. The lesson I think is that I have to spray closer and heavier, and I need a proper gun. I'm also not crazy at all about the glossiness. I'm going to stop using the Delfleet paint and switch to something I found at Stevenson's. I think it's a Valspar product. Also a single stage 2K urethane, but it comes in gloss black, semi gloss or flat black. I looked at the sample card in their store in it was very close to the stock paint that's still present around the stick shift area.
Note: I inquired about a semi-gloss version of the Delfleet paint at the store that supplied the gloss version to me. I They said it doesn't exist... but it does.... this could be the semi gloss single stage I am looking for.
The other supplier for paint which is designed for restoring black running gear is Eastwood's chassis black. For some reason I haven't ever ordered anything from these guys. Maybe the exact paint is staring me in the face and I'm not paying attention.
With the family away for a few days, I was able to move ahead on a long-awaited step of the 1967 VW bug project: stripping and priming the pan. I had wrestled the front beam suspension into the side yard several months ago and stripped it with the pressure blaster. This worked ok but it's always more of an ordeal than I think it will be. This is the Harbor Freight 68994- the "20 lb. Pressurized Abrasive Blaster". I bought their soda blaster, which is like a smaller version of the same idea. Couldn't get any useful results out of that. It never really did anything, in addition to clogging. As the soda is so sensitive to moisture, I felt that even using desiccant dryers in the air line weren't enough. When I poured media back out of it, it was in clumps. Not too different from what you'd find in a box of baking soda after a couple weeks of being open. I cleaned it out and left the soda blaster by the dumpsters at the airport. It was gone by the next morning. I went back to the store to buy something more serious. One of those things you walk out of the HF store thinking, is this a waste of money too?
Well it was a huge improvement. I filled this one halfway with Aluminum Oxide (50 lb. bag 61870) I found this to be quite effective. There are a lot of negative reviews on the site with this item. I think most of the complaints are about clogging. I would say that using a dryer in line is an absolute necessity with anything like this, and even then, you're still going to find moisture getting in there after a few cycles of the compressor.
My setup is an Ingersoll Rand SS3L3 60 Gallon vertical compressor. This is a 230V unit, and pushes 10.3 cubic feet pre minute at 90 PSI. I would think this is a pretty hefty compressor for a home shop, but for something like sandblasting, or bead blasting with a cabinet, it's just not even close. It will run constantly with that kind of application. The specs say it's 100% duty cycle, but I don't really believe it. Within 15-20 minutes, it gets much too hot to touch: both the motor and the pump. Even the upper half of the tank gets very hot on a 70-80ยบ day after a few cycles of dropping pressure and pumping back up. It will accumulate water and you'll have to drain it. The desiccant dryer will get saturated, and you'll notice the water start making it's way out through the lines and right out the nozzle. Even when I'm spraying paint I think this compressor works pretty hard to keep up. It's been a great unit otherwise. I just think you have to pace yourself.
I set up the pan under a 10X10 sun shade, covering the ground with a large plastic tarp that has its edges rolled up and clamped to the supports of the sun shade about 2 feet up. This effectively creates an outdoor blast 'room' where all the blast media settles on the tarp. (OK, most of the blast media...) When the tank runs out of media, it's swept up, poured into a bucket, then sifted through a strainer on a funnel that goes back into the blast tank. I'm wearing a long-sleeved coat, leather work gloves with cuffs, a hat, hearing protection and a full face respirator. So it's not just about buying a blaster, it's about creating a work area that is effective and safe. After doing the front suspension beam with a mask respirator I decided to spring for the full face version. I think having your eyes and skin protected makes a world of difference, especially with 2-part paints that you can feel curing on your skin after you're done working. This is a 3M 6800 series respirator that accepts a variety of different cartridges (I use 60296) for different hazards. It also has replaceable acetate face shields that have adhesive tabs. It is not a cheap item: I think I paid about 80 bucks for a size 'medium'.
Recommendations were that they run large. I have a giant head and it fits very well. It's also serviceable in the sense that you can discard the plastic clear protector, remove the cartridges, remove the inner mouthpiece and run the entire thing under water and carefully dry it and start all over. If your neck and head and respirator are covered in abrasive media, the last thing you want to do it wipe this plastic thing down unless you want it instantly hazed with scratches.
So, back to the blaster... when I see those negative reviews on HF, I think a lot has to do with folks not drying their air enough. The more you run it, the more water gets compressed into the system (I'm in California. It's super dry here. I can't even begin to think how it would work in say, Florida). But it's more than that. It's just a lot of work. A lot of schlepping and messing around trying to recover the media and clean it and recycle it. You going to be making a big production out of this when you do a big piece outside like this. The progress is still pretty slow, as effective as the unit is with the right setup. Sort of like you're cleaning with a 1 inch diameter eraser.
After about 3-4 hours of blasting all the tar coating of the underside of the pan, I was about 75% done. I was getting a lot of clogging. And I think the neighbors had had enough of pssshhhhhhh...... so I stopped. I wrapped the whole thing in plastic, drained the compressor tank and all the lines and had a beer.
This morning I went out again and fired it all up again. Everything had dried out nicely and I cleaned up the last of the stubborn undercoating.
It's weird because these pans are so different from left to right. One pan feels like higher quality steel and the paint is so tough it's almost like it's powder coated. Not even the legit aircraft paint remover gel would touch it. Hours of the gel on there did nothing. The other pan I could strip within an hour with the same stripper. Just coming off in sheets, and then the steel with start rusting in a day. So I was eager to get this all cleaned up and primed with some better quality primer.
The first primer I tried on the top of the pan and the front axle beam was from Stevenson's Paint and Supply in Carson. There aren't many auto body supply places in southern California and I've always had a pretty chill experience here. I bought a high solids primer several months ago that was their own labelled brand- similar to PPG DP40. I was not able to get a good finish with this. The paint is very thick- like heavy cream. I have not been able to spray this kind of primer well at all, even when I bought a primer gun with a 2mm nozzle, it would clog and splatter. I could get it to cover but the finish was substandard. I think this is probably more to do with my paint gun game being terrible than with the tools. Like my pressures and settings were off. I did the top of the pan with this primer and while it's not a very smooth finish, I was able to get it done and covered. Any 2-part urethane or epoxy paint is light years ahead of a spray can and I expect this to be a functional base for whoever sprays the color over it. and I expect it to last avery long time. The stuff is like rock. I eventually ran out of the quart I bought.
The other place I go to J&S Autobody Paint & Supply up on Melrose Ave. Also very helpful. I told them I was painting over bare metal and they gave me PPG OneChoice ECOBASE Etch Prime. I had some advice years ago with aluminum parts and zinc chromate primers- that you needed only a very light coat. I think this was probably intended for a similar application. It couldn't be more different than the other primer. Also, I had quite the sticker shock for this stuff. About $175. For a QUART. Actually it's two quarts because it's a 1:1 ratio. But yeah. Things have gotten expensive.
With the last bit of blasting complete, I was going to wrap it in plastic and take it back into the garage for another time, but after sweeping up all around and vacuuming and blowing off the pan, It seemed a clean enough place to do the painting, and I really wanted to just get it done. I painted the first coat with a brush to get into every nook and cranny. The paint couldn't have been more different from the high solids primer- thin almost as water. I realized this would probably spray much better so for the second coat I did exactly that.
I probably should have sprayed much lighter coats- it's not recommended to let the film thickness get to heavy. But now at least it won't rust while I stand there watching.
Another small accomplishment was pressing the ball joints into the VW suspension arms. This can't be done without removing the rubber collar that holds the grease in place. A carefully applied awl to lift the wire retainer clip up and around the collar will allow it to be lifted free. This is something to do slowly and carefully as it'd be easy to puncture the boot or stab yourself. You do need something sharp to get in there and lift it out. After that the boot slips off and I wrap some painters tape around the shaft to keep grease from getting everywhere while I do the pressing. I used an appropriately sized socket or a piece of steel pipe from Home Depot that's the right diameter. This job was definitely at the outer limit of what this one of the little 12 ton presses can do: the I-beam supporting the part was pushing down more and more and nothing was happening, then suddenly POP!, it pushed in halfway, then more easily made its way to the fully seated position.
Kind of a small milestone- as this is one of the very first times I actually started putting something together instead of taking it apart.