[njsteve]

It took several days of soaking to get all of the white paint off of the other flares. The purple stuff doesn't seem to touch primer-surfacer layers so that took a lot of 80 grit sandpaper and a Black&Decker Mouse sounder. That stuff is hard as rock. That is the reason the flares still have a yellowish tint to the white plastic. I had to get most of that layer off to see where the stress cracks were. I also found some more serious cracks from impact damage on one of the flares.

Here is a close up of one of the stress cracks in the lower front spoiler.

I ended up fixing these by using the plastic welder and smearing at across the cracks perpendicular to the direction of the crack. This melted the plastic back together. It took a while to get all the cracks welded up.

The marks in the lower portion of the flare are from the stress crack remelting process.
The black spots are where I used black ABS plastic rod to weld the majpr impact damage cracks back to gether. Once it cools it is sanded down with 80 grit.

[njsteve]

One of the front flares was actually melted and burned from the prior owner's carb fire that got out of control. You can see how warped the edge was. For that repair I used a heat gun and heated the area up til it was soft and then squeezed the area between two wooden rulers to straighten it until it cooled. It took a few tries but eventually flattened out.

[njsteve]

This is another use for the heat gun: you can weld plastic with it. This is the attachment for plastic welding. You can insert the plastic welding rod into the hole at the top of the tip or you can use it without the rod as in this photo and just melt the pieces together. It looks like this flare was repaired once before since it has a 1973 red inner brace glued to it. Their glue didnt hold very well so I welded it to the flare and later followed up with a liberal smearing of 2-part epoxy.

[njsteve]

Here is the formerly melted front flare. And when compared to it's twin.

I also used the heat gun to reinforce cracked areas on the lower part of the melted front flare. Once that was done I used the 2-part epoxy to glue the back section back to the flare where it separated from the fire.

I used my patented "flare rentention fixture" to get the pieces in the right position so the epoxy could harden overnight.

[njsteve]

Here are the finished two front flares. And the sanded out, welded up cracks:

[njsteve]

And here are the finished rear flares. They were in a little better shape with just some cracks near the upper and lower mounting screw positions. I used the 2-part paintable/sandable epoxy to reinforce the lower mounting areas as well as the front and back sides of all of the upper mounting positions on all four flares. It sands very easily once it hardens overnight. This stuff really helps with the rigidity of the flares and should prevent future cracks from starting at the screw holes. I used a liberal slathering of it at all of the originally glued areas on the back sides as well, since the factory glue probably wasn't up to the task of holding the parts together after 35 years.

[njsteve]

And here's the remnants of that original spoiler. It looks like it took the brunt of the flames as the gas poured out the air cleaner snorkel down the radiator shroud and onto the radiator support.

Here's the original "crime scene" photo:

[njsteve]

And here's the spoiler. It's just a little too far gone for me. I can always put it on ebay as a "nearly NOS piece."

[Norwood]

Steve, I would suggest that you test fit ALL of the spoiler peices, before they go to paint.

[njsteve]

Very good suggestion. They fit very well originally and luckily the melted/wavy section was on the inner area inside the wheelwell and not along the front fender edge. I still need to get some of the repro welting before I trial fit them.

[njsteve]

I have been wondering what to do about the scratched up anodized aluminum window trim on the front and back windows. I figured I have no problem with polishing them if I could get the old scratched anodized finish off somehow. So, I did a little searching and found the following method worked pretty well. It seems that using Sodium Hydroxide (common household powdered lye/drain cleaner) is what most people recommend. I also stumbled across something that worked much better for the initial heavy stripping...what is it? Why the same old "Purple Stuff" of course! I happened to place a couple of trim pieces in the Purple Stuff just to clean them off and after a few minutes the anodizing started crusting up and bubbling off. So, I did what most people would then do: I read the ingredients on the Purple Stuff jug and low and behold it contains Sodium Hydroxide. It must be in some heavy concentration because it worked much faster than lye mixed in water.

Here is what I set up to do the larger pieces: a kiddy pool lined with heavy 6-ply plastic sheeting from Home Depot. I filled it with about 8 gallons of water and then added one can of powdered Drano. It takes about 2 hours before any progress is observed.

[njsteve]

It does take time and you have to continually check on the progress so you dont get to the point where the anodizing is gone and your aluminum trim starts feeding the chemical reaction instead. Here is the trim after about 5 hours. You can see the tiny foaming bubbles rising from the trim pieces.

The second photo is what the piece looked like at the 8-hour mark. You can see most of the anodizing is gone except in the corner area, which was the slowest area to dissolve.

[njsteve]

After seeing what the Purple Stuff did I set up a plastic pipe capped at the bottom and filled with the Purple Stuff. I then hung the straight price of trim on a wire and hung it in the pipe.

You need to check this solution frequently and use a Scotch Brite pad or 0000 stainless steel wool to scrape the anodized crust off of the surface. This allows the chemical to get a better bite at the surface and continue the process. The Purple Stuff does work very well and very rapidly but seems to reach a point of diminishing returns after a few hours.

Here it is after 30 minutes...and after 2 hours.

[njsteve]

The reason I used the Purple Stuff and tube method on the long piece was simply, that it was too long to fully submerge in the kiddy pool. You have to have the entire piece submerged otherwise you get uneven stripping and a big parting line in the trim piece.

Once the Purple Stuff did its work I then washed it in cold water and then transfered the straight trim piece to a section of plastic gutter lined with the same 6-ply plastic sheeting. I filled it with some of the same lye and water solution from the kiddy pool. You can see that the 2 chemical method (Purple Stuff followed by lye/water) works well as the lye solution immediately started taking away the remaining anodizing.

[njsteve]

From start to finish it took 12 hours of soaking in the lye solution to remove all of the anodizing. This included the periodic removal of the trim from the solution, the scrubbing of the surface and washing with cold water and then replacing in the solution again. I think if you used a higher concentration than one can per 10 gallons of cold water you would get faster results. One website I found suggested 1/2 cup per gallon of cold water. But since I was trying not to poison everyone in the house I decided to do the conservative method. When I was done, I poured the drain cleaner solution down the slowest sink drain in the house, which cleaned that up a bit as well. As for the trim pieces, I placed them in the shower and hosed them down with cold water for 5 minutes or so to get all the residue off.

One additional thing to remember. You must use proper protection: heavy rubber gloves and safety glasses are a minimum, plus proper ventilation.

Here is the before on the corner piece...and the after...And here are the other pieces, all ready for polishing this weekend.


This was a cautionary reminder I found on one website concerning using this method:

"Fast and easy, maybe. Dangerous, absolutely. Just one more reminder that every year trained professionals wearing protective gear are seriously injured when something goes wrong making up solutions of sodium hydroxide. It has an enormous "heat of solution" / "heat of dilution". This means when sodium hydroxide is mixed with water, it heats up the water. Not a big problem if a small amount is well mixed into a large amount of cold water. But if a small amount of water mixes with a large amount of sodium hydroxide (which can happen even in a large tank with poor mixing), that small amount of water is instantaneously turned into steam and erupts the contents of the tank all over the operator."

http://www.finishing.com/3600-3799/3674.shtml

[Lloyd-TX]

Nice work Steve - great info and pics.

Question - do you have a source to have the trim pieces re-anodized?

[rustedgoat]

Steve, how many gallons of Super Clean have you gone thru? (when you call it Purple Stuff people might think its one of those cheaper brands). I have autozone checking if they can get a deal on a 30 gal drum for me. I figured about 10 gals for a soaking tub that would fit suspension pieces in.

I found a site
http://hpd.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/house...tbl=chem&id=19

Super Clean has 1-5% sodium hydroxide in it

I picked up some liquid drain cleaner (sodium hydroxide put a rusty piece of flooring in to test it and after 24 hrs it really didn't doing anything to the primer or rust. A similar piece in phosphoric acid (Behr concrete etcher) the rust was eaten away and it did nothing to the primer. I left it in for like a week and it just about disolved the small pice of metal.

[njsteve]

Here is a anodizing site someone recommended to me:

http://www.kingoftrim.com/home.html

As for the purple stuff, most of them are about the same. I have used several different brands with the same result. I have about 10 gallons of it that I use and then pour back except for the last little bit of dirty junk at the bottom.

The purple stuff does absolutely nothing for rust but it is great for stripping paint from plastic parts without harming the plastic, and now as I have just found out, it is good for stripping anodizing from aluminum via a chemical reaction. Oh, and it will strip your outer layers of skin from your hands if you dont wear gloves.

Dont bother using liquid drain cleaner. From your link, it only is about 1% to 5% Sodium Hydroxide versus the powdered form which ranges from 30% to 60% Sodium Hydroxide. Oh, by the way, it is so comforting to know that Crest Tooth Whitening Strips have the same active ingredient: Sodium Hydroxide. ;-)

[keith k]

Steve, you are like the mad scientist Trans Am restorer...! Great stuff.

So it sounds like you're going to have a crack at polishing the trim rather than re-anodizing? Looking forward to seeing how that turns out-

[superdutybob]

Keith:

If you want to protect the aluminum trim you can polish it and then have it clear anodized. I do it to aluminum snowmobile parts all the time. Works great!