Dealing with surface rust

Hi Gang! Dne’ here! ; ) I hope all of my wonderful viewers are having a great evening! ; )  I’ve decided to go to the archives and pull up some issues I had to deal with on my 67 Mustang! RUST, MAINLY SURFACE RUST! This is nothing new in the automotive restoration business, but was new to me! The nice guy that I bought this Mustang from said, “just take a wire brush to it, it will come off!” ha ha ha!

Let’s start this off with my right front fender~ I’ll tell you right now, it was a hopeless case! It was horrible! But I tried to save it, I really did! I sanded and used untold amounts of DA paper! I eventually gave up on it and bought a used right front fender from Bruce@Surefirerestorations.com in east Houston.  That fender needed a lot of work too, but that’s another story!

However, the left (driver’s side) front fender was a different story even though it looked similar in distress as the right fender! Yes, I sanded and sanded~ Bruce, again, suggested phosphoric acid~ so let’s give that a try!

I bought a gallon of Fast Etch by Eastwood.  After aggressively sanding, I applied this acid-based rust remover liberally by soaking the surface of whatever I was working on by soaking paper towels to keep the phosphoric acid in place and moist. It’s a watery looking substance, not terribly odor ridden and OK to work with, but I used adequate ventilation, wore rubber gloves, and eye protection.

Ho! Almost forgot! The Fast Etch also leaves a zinc phosphate coating that protects the fresh metal, for how long? Long enough in my case.

However, the phosphoric acid just couldn’t help the roof and part in front of the trunk lid!

But believe you me, I tried! In the picture below, the roof was still wet with the Fast Etch. Notice the rust still hanging around to torment me a little more, or I should say a lot more!:(  If you’ll search the tools blog, and look for vacuum sandblaster, you’ll see how I took care of this particular problem.; )

Fortunately, both doors were salvageable! ; ) I soaked them overnight and would check on the soaked paper towels impregnated with Fast Etch often~ I didn’t want it to dry up!  Amazingly, metal started to appear after intensive Fast Etch therapy! : )  I was happy, very happy! Something actually worked!

Here I was playing with my door installer from Harbor freight tools. I work alone remember, so I’m always looking for ways to make my life a little easier! But this story is not about the door installer, but notice the door~ it appears to be normal!

After shooting some epoxy primer from Eastwood,(BTW, I bought a lot of material from Eastwood) the doors and fenders were really shaping up! After a lot of filler, sanding and blocking, and more primer, etc., the body parts started looking very good, not great to the pros, but to me, really good!

So, this is a short blog isn’t it? It’s short and sweet! ; )  The phosphoric acid provided a means for me make progress! Nothing worse that sitting at a standstill!

I hope this has provided some useful information! Also, I hope I didn’t make the Fast Etch sound like a miracle! It was still a lot of work, but I would use it again and recommend it! I still have a left over half-gallon in the garage! Never know!

I hope you’ll follow me on Classic Cars and Tools and sign up for updates! Oh, I recently joined Twitter, but need to work on that! ; ) Until the next blog! dne’