1953 Rover P4 75
December 2018 - Finished fenders and more sand blasting
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Finished front fenders (wings)
Now starting to resemble a P4 again!
Engine compartment coming together. On the driver side I mounted a radiator coolant reservoir bottle taken from a 1980s Mazda truck that fit nicely.
More sand blasting!
At this point the only remaining major parts that required blasting were the doors, hood and trunk. All of those pieces are made out of Birmabright aluminium. Rover and other British car manufacturers had to deal with steel shortages following World War II so Rover used aluminium wherever possible. I was concerned that my approach of wire wheeling steel panels followed by sand blasting was going to be too aggressive for aluminium. I anticipated that skipping the wire wheeling step and just straight up sand blast the parts with my equipment was going to take forever. So I decided to contract out this dirty task to a local mobile media blasting service. I brought in Texas Green Blast and these guys did a great job blasting the paint off all 4 doors, hood and trunk in just about 2 hours! They spent an additional hour blasting the smaller parts including door hinges and other miscellaneous parts. If I had used my setup then I probably would have needed a full week and hated the experience so contracting this out was well worth the expense.
Doors and other parts ready to be media blasted. Texas Green Blast serves the Central Texas area and has a great reputation. In fact, the founder and owner of the business hails from the UK and even remembered those Rovers from his early years.
Each door only took about 20 minutes to strip with their huge diesel powered media blaster equipment mounted on a trailer. It is gratifying to watch paint peel away in a jiffy.
Stripping door hinges and miscellany.
Epoxy primer
All the steel parts were primed right away to prevent flash rusting.
Doors all stripped and ready for priming. Priming can wait a bit longer since the doors aren't steel.