Battery Tray Rust Repairs & POR-15

[Tidybuoy]

Since I'm pulling the engine to install a new clutch, I thought this would be a good time to do some needed battery tray maintenance.

Any advice I can get would be great.

My battery tray is not too bad but there is definately some rust (hopefully it's all surface rust). However, when I recently re-located the fuel pump to the front, I noticed that where the fuel pump normally mounts, there was some rust that went clear thru.

My plans were to wire brush as much away as possible & clean up everything with baking soda and then paint with POR-15. I was planning on putting on the POR-15 with a brush to really work it in and then sand & spray.

Am I on the right track here?

Any advice would be appreciated...........................Vern

[914GT]

You might try the baking soda w/lots of water first. You'd be surprised how well this can neutralize the acid and wash off a lot of the rust. If there's still rust, either go with a rust-converter (Ospho, SEM Rust-Mort) or rust remover (Naval Jelly). But once your done you need to dry it out fast, using compressed air or a hair dryer, otherwise it will immediately get surface rust again. Then brush on your POR15, or I've even used an airbrush with epoxy primer for small areas.

Let me edit this to add something - if you have a rust-through the best thing would be to cut/grind out oxidized metal and appropriately rust-convert or protect the metal inside, then weld on a patch and use POR15 or similar protection (maybe a rocker spray or something) to go over that.