More fun...
This weekend I decided to tackle the front guards. I'm by no means finished, but I figured you might appreciate the update
The early guards are now very hard and very expensive to get in good condition... quite a few have been lost to the ravages of time, and it would seem a lot have found homes on backdates.
Anyway I was scared about mine. The flange where guards meet the monocoque is (in my opinion) a relatively poor design. It requires a layer of 'dum dum' (a black mastic like substance) to bed the flanges in and then they are bolted together. Crucially it also relies on a well fitting bonnet seal to keep water from finding a way into the gap. Unfortunately a previous owner was too tight to spring for the correct seal after a repaint in 1996 and settled for a generic rubber strip (no water channel). This has allowed a lot of water to find its way into the flange with only the respective layers of paint on each flange keeping water from steel.
When I first removed the guards last year I could see the paint had failed and that there was quite a bit of rust along the flange. Cut forward to today and it would seem I've dodged a bullet with the rust being pretty superficial - it will still get a sandblast to be sure though and maybe a patch or two where it's a bit thin.
First thing to do is remove that gawd-awful black schutz from inside, and as with everywhere else on this old car - a thin layer of rust has developed underneath areas of it and I'm once again pleased to have caught it all in time. My method once again is to use paint stripper and a scraper, followed with a bit more stripper and steel wool to clean the metal up (which I haven't done yet)
