This part of the project has without a doubt been the biggest challenge and taken the most time. I started the underside restoration by laying on my back with scotch-brite pads and gasoline stripping the bottom of undercoating and then using a 3M clean and strip wheels to remove the paint. This was taking forever because it was such a miserable job and I could not get the ambition to work on it. The body was basically done and I was almost at a stand still. The car sat almost two years and had little done to it because of this. I finally realized there was no way I would ever complete this car if I couldn't get the floor done. So I build a cradle that bolted to the front frame mounts and the rear leaf springs and rolled the car up on its side. Once rolled I removed the rear cradle and blocked the back of the car.

I would of guessed there was a weeks work and it would be ready to roll back over. I was wrong ! At least if the car is going to be done in the detail I want.... The clean and strip wheels do a great job on all the semi-flat stuff, but there is no way to get in all the holes and along the uni-frame rails. So I stripped as much as possible with the wheel and taped off the back of the car for blasting with fine silica sand.

You would think that it would easy from here, at least I did. Once again I was wrong. Even though the car is rust free, the first coat of DP90 revealed surface imperfections that would require one coat of filler primer. The key was to fill the pits and imperfections without losing the factory sheet metal stamps and wrinkles.

And to make this worse, there are many small holes and cracks. Get carried away with the primer and you will find yourself sanding out those little holes and cracks with a Popsicle stick, something that can take hours. I only got sloppy a couple of times before I got tired of sanding over spray.

I know all this sounds a little extreme, but I have always said "You have to have to be obsessive about something in life" This is what I picked.

I am a purist and really enjoy a properly over sprayed restoration with all the "production worker" factory details. But some things are hard to ruin??

Below is some original pictures and flaws from the factory. I am OK with the over spray, but I will have a hard time re-creating the runs after hours of wet sanding the bottom of the car with 600.

The picture above is the trunk pan next to the fuel tank. The heavy line in the paint is where they painted the sides of the fuel tank and it accumulated heavy on the floor next to it. Yes, they sprayed the sides of the fuel tank, which I have every intention of doing with the new fuel tank.

This is the floor behind the rear seat. The seat-belt bolt is visible on the bottom of the picture. As you can see, there is Bolero red over spray on top of  blue paint/primer. I have not talked to anyone else that has seen blue on the bottom of their car, but I guarantee you this is factory. It is under every bracket, body plug, etc. Check out the nice runs where the workers laid it on heavy. This is something I decided not to duplicate :)

Here is the factory HEAVY undercoating that is behind the rear fender well. The fender wells have been stripped from undercoating in this picture, but they looked very similar.

As I mentioned above, it is impossible to clean up along the frame rails and tight spots without sand blasting. This picture was taken after blasting with silica sand. As you can see, the "easy parts" of the car were stripped with a 3M clean and strip wheel.

This is one of the areas I was talking about. The factory would of shot one "clean" smooth coat of paint so there should be no rough over spray in the holes and valleys. The production workers were using hi-capacity spray guns and were laying it on pretty heavy with a wide pattern. I haven't seen any cars which have a "dry" base on it. I have seen several cars with little or no coverage in areas.