First thing to do was finish tank. Removed tape covering openings, sanded paint edge to feather, did standard Marine Clean - Metal Prep routine. Painted with POR Patch because area was so small. Applying POR Patch next to POR-15 paint revealed Patch goes on thicker.
I spent some time inspecting nose area from underneath, and planning how to treat boxed-in area under nose. The upper, exposed sheet metal has some rust-throughs. Three ares will need welded-in patches. But surrounding underside will need treatment, and access is partially blocked by doubler. As see in these photos, the doubler has holes, and on RH especially has rusted away. May need reinforcement. Plan is to wire brush what can be reached and use rolled gauze bandage with knots tied to apply Metal Clean and Metal Prep. Will also use my garden sprayer. Painting will be messy!
Work on front end continued with headlight removal. Original screws were rusty but came out easily. Three wrong size replacements were rusted in tight. PB Blaster got two, one had no slot and had to be ground off.
Removed headlight brackets. Bolt at RH outboard serves as ground point, had been replaced by oversize screw and wing nut.
Lamp adjustment uses two hand turned nuts with long plastic handles and one spring per bulb. Note that two adjusters are long and two are short, use long ones in outboard (deeper) bucket. Threaded rod has special plastic hook at end, fits into bucket.
Disassembling adjusters was extremely hard. Soaked with PB Blaster and let sit an hour, just able to break loose. I was worried the plastic would break.
Finished the day sanding down previous application of filler at RH rear. Several low spots remained, plus a small hole that requited fiberglass and POR-15 to fill.
No comments:
Post a Comment