Vacuum Sandblaster

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

Hi Y’all! Dne’ here once again! ; ) This blog is about the frustration of dealing with rust, pitted rust! My poor ’67 Mustang coupe was suffering from a bad form of rust on the roof. The man I purchased it from said,”oh, just take a wire brush to it and it should clean up ok!”  Sometimes my common sense just doesn’t kick in when it should! Of course I bought it, hook, line and sinker!

I guess if there was anything good to say about the roof and the part below the rear window, the rust wasn’t all the way through! Thank Goodness!

Saving the roof for LATER, I finally had to tackle it! I just pulled out my sanders went to work! Wire brushing? ha ha! 36- 80 grit da paper and my orbital 8″ oscillating sander ,and my straight line sander~ ha ha! This stuff was tough! TOUGH!

A really nice guy, Bruce, the owner of Surefirerestorations.com, he said try phosphoric acid, let it soak. So, I bought a gallon of Fast Etch from Eastwood.com and was hoping for a miracle! not! It did work on other parts of my stang, but not this roof!

My arsenal for removing the rusty surface! An 8″ occillating sander, a Hutchins DA (best da in the world), and a straight line sander from Harbor Freight tools.

I gave up! I gave in to the rust! I bought rust convertors, encapsulators, metal preps, metal wash, etc. and had the surface “looking” nice!

Though this looks really nice, and even I was impressed with how nice my roof appeared, a few months later, bubbles started popping up! All this gorgeous paint was to be stripped off!  I could have cried! I had never painted anything so pretty!

Here’s where the title comes in! Necessity is the mother of invention!

Further back, I did try a spot of sandblasting on this surface, but what a mess! aluminum oxide was in everything!  I needed a vacuum sandblaster, and badly! I wasn’t about to spend 2-400 bucks on one either!

I modified one of my shop vac’s suction ends to allow the blasting nozzle of my sandblaster to be inserted. This would allow me to suck up the sand(aluminum oxide) as I make small passes over the roof or whatever I was blasting!

I have to give phrase to my Sear Professional 2 stage compressor! This compressor kicks butt! Of course sandblasting requires a significant amount of volume, so I had to let the compressor catch up now and then, or give it a rest! but even I needed a rest during this meticulous type of work!

After making a few test passes to see if this was even going to work, I was satisfied and a load was lifted from my worry about having to put another roof on! yeah, another roof!? NOT within my scope of ability!

So did some aluminum oxide escape my vacuum? of course, but not bad at all! did I have to clean my vacuum’s filter? yes, often! ; )  Did this procedure to save my roof work?

INDEED IT DID!

What happened next? Preparation of the metal, epoxy priming, filler primers, etc. The surface was not perfect by any means, but was workable! After build primers, I still had large dents in the roof to fill and finish with a light filler putty, the name of it I forget, but there were millions of small pits that had to be filled!

Yours Truly shortly after the first paint as up above.

The roof is still looking nice to this day~ will it last? Maybe! but nothing lasts forever!

I am bonded with my 67 Ford Mustang Coupe! I treat it better than my new 2011 Cx9 Mazda. My Mustang lives in an air-conditioned garage while all our newer cars sit outside! I don’t drive it cause I know someone may open their door and ding my door or other body parts! I love my Mustang and the year it was born in! Those were glorious times of simplicity.  I hope you have enjoyed this blog and maybe some of my other blogs and stories on Classic Cars and Tools! ; )