First Attack on Spare Tire Well

My plan for today was to repair the rust holes in the spare tire well using fiberglass impregnated with POR-15. This needed to be done before treating the exterior of the well, which needs to be done before welding on the patch I have been working on. This is a case of dependencies; happily I realized this before getting hopelessly ahead of myself.

At the outset I thought I would do the entire inside of the well. All I had to do was scrub off the loose, rusty bits with a wire brush. It turns out that this area is treated with a hearty layer of black tar, which made progress slow. To scale the task to the available time I focused my efforts on the back half, and ended up doing a bit less. Still it was enough to allow me to move forward on the rear panel repair.

I did not bother with a before picture because there are plenty of those in previous postings. Actually, a before picture would not have revealed the extent of the damage due to the way the still tenacious rubbery undercoating covered the holes. I would say that most of the rust damage in this area was from the inside. I wonder why the black, tar-like primer failed to block moisture. It was not until I wire-brushed the outside that the holes became clearly visible.

The first set of pictures were taken after wiping the area with acetone to clean off any tar spread by the wire brush, followed by the usual Marine-Clean and Metal-Ready treatment. The orange stuff is primer. Since it is stuck in pitted areas I suspect it was part of a rust treatment -- these areas would have left the factory smooth. Maybe that black tar primer was another after-market treatment. The black layer is most apparent along the border between bare metal and finish painted surface and is on top of the orange primer.





Due to the compound curves I cut the fiberglass on the bias. Here it is worked into place over bare metal.



Here is how it looked after applying POR-15. Actually I used my tube of POR PATCH, which is basically POR-15 in a tube. I spread it with a small foam rubber brush.



I was worried about attempting this today because it was raining hard on my way to the shop. Luckily by the time I was ready to apply the paint the rain had stopped and the air was considerably drier.

For dinner my family met with our old friend Lester Mau. It is not very often that the four of us sit down for dinner together, and to go out with a friend is almost unheard of these days. We ate at Good to Grill, next to the new Safeway in Kapahulu. Not bad. Obviously the price of the meal goes mostly to ingredients, but what little service we got was pleasant.



Last but not least, it is time once again for the annual Dunn family Christmas photo. Yes, it is wacky, a tradition in itself.



Ah yeah, one more thing. On Saturday we attended the annual mochi pounding party given by a friend of a friend, in Kapahulu. I took a lot of pictures and have not had time to sort through them, but I did put together a little video. You can watch it on YouTube.