I had such good luck with the patches in the fenders last time, I decided to see how it would work on the outside. I couldn’t get it as thin as I would have liked, but I knew I would be filing and sanding it down anyway.

Since a little goes a long way with this stuff, I rolled some up and reinforced inside the rolled lip of both fenders behind the cracks. I also filled the underside of that smoosh on the rear to try and reshape the bottom edge of the lip.

Letting those sit overnight, I went back with the highest grit sandpaper I had and it barely left a mark on that epoxy putty. It really is hard stuff once it has set. So, I after them with a coarse metal file.

They are still wayyyy too thick, especially on the passenger’s side rear. I will have to eventually go back with an electric sander to get that the rest of the way down. For the time being, it’s better than it was, being untreated rusty metal exposed.

Shot a quick coat of matte vintage blue and called it a day.

Both rear fenders have cracks from old damage.

I bought a tube of JB Weld SteelStik (Amazon link), which is steel reinforced epoxy putty. When dried, it is hard enough to drill and tap, so I figured it would work well to reinforce the back side of the fenders, behind the cracks.

I had a can of bean dip from the previous Sunday’s football watching festivities. I cut patches out of the ribbed aluminum can with tin snips, covered them with epoxy putty, and sandwiched them on the back side of the fenders.

The picture on the left is the driver’s side fender. The crack there is very thin, a clean break, but wraps all the way around the lip. The one on the right is the passenger’s side. The crack there is much worse – not even really a crack. It’s very old damage, below the bumper, with flaps of deeply rusted metal. I bent everything back in shape as well as I could, to get a flat surface for the patch.

After the epoxy set up, the fenders are now solid and the cracks don’t flex. So, that was a success. At least in the short term. We’ll see after some weather cycles if that epoxy holds up.

On that driver’s side fender there were old, bad repairs and it looked nasty. I sanded around the area, then rust treated, primed, and painted.

After the first couple of coats of primer and paint went down, there was a lot of texture to the paint. Mainly over-spray dust. I tried going over it first with the blue Scotch-Brite pad, which is the one safe for non-stick pans. That took some dust off, but not the texture.

I then stepped it up to the regular old green Scotch-Brite pad, which also removed some more dust, but not the texture. I found 3M makes a prep pad specifically for in-between coats. I bought a pack of those and tried them out, but same deal – removed some dust, but not the texture. And honestly, those pads seemed to be somewhere in between the blue and green Scotch-Brite pads, so I didn’t put much faith in them working.

So, I had to wet sand again. This time, I had some leftover 1500 grit sheets from a variety pack I bought at Harbor Freight a while back. The sheets are really thin and wear through immediately. They also smear black across whatever you’re sanding, so I was concerned about that.

I did a little area with the 1500 grit and as per usual, the sheet immediately blew out and made a mess, so I went and bought some 3M 1000 grit sheets. This did a nice job and was proper quality sandpaper. I went over the whole roof and pillars with a roughly 2 1/2″ x 5″ sanding block.

There were still some low spots, where the roof is pretty dented up, so I cut a dish sponge in half, making a more flexible, roughly 2 1/2″ by 2 1/2″ block to wrap the sandpaper around. With that, I went over the low spots and for the most part got them smoothed out.

My masking job the first time around was pretty questionable. I had some over-spray on window rubbers here and there and for whatever reason (likely because I’m an idiot) at the bottom of the pillars, I didn’t follow any sort of body lines. Instead, I just squared off the bottom of each pillar, not realizing how ridiculous that was going to look once the masking was peeled off.

So, first step was properly masking around the bottom of the pillars and getting the rust converter and primer down.

I took the antenna off and rather than trying to clean off the over-spray from the first time around, I just painted the pieces with some cheap black primer.

I used plastic drop cloths for masking this time. I had problems with the blue painters tape not sticking well last time, so I tried a different variety. This time, it was much worse. The tape only stuck to the plastic sheet – not to the car or itself. So, I was having to restick the tape all around the car before each coat.

After two more coats of paint:

And then after wet-sanding with 1000 grit again:

While I was there, I also adjusted the windshield wipers up a little (too much). They were flopping down over the bottom of the window rubber and the one on the driver side was overlapping the left side of the window rubber as well. Likely, they just aren’t the right size wiper blades. I’ll have to check that out later.

I have to plan my next steps carefully, since I now have “only” six cans of that paint left. As mentioned in the Goodbye Matte Vintage Blue post, this paint has been discontinued and I have bought all that is available in the county.

That’s not going to be enough to do the whole car, but I only got started painting this because of the rust pitting. Following that logic, I should finish the space below the windshield and then do the front trunk lid. Those are the next most rusty places.

Then on to the rear, finishing up the space below the rear window and then the engine cover. We’ll see what’s left after that.

As mentioned in the Panel Beater post, my last batch of shine juice clotted up and became tacky cement on the car. It wouldn’t wash off. Mineral spirits wouldn’t take it off. I ended up wiping the whole car down with Acetone, which accomplished a couple of things.

It easily cleaned off the shine juice residue, but also removed the top layer of dead paint. Since I have been washing the car with Scotch-Brite pads and CLR, it didn’t break my heart that more of the light blue paint was coming off.

What did break my heart was seeing that the sun-burnt rust spots on the roof were much more deeply pitted than I had previously noticed. I felt like I needed to take action beyond keeping it oiled up with shine juice to try and slow that rust down. Having ten cans of that Matte Vintage Blue spray paint sitting around didn’t help to deter me from the bad ideas that were creeping up.

I got a can of Sprayway glass cleaner, a sanding block and some 220 grit wet/dry sandpaper and went to work.

After getting it smoothed out for the most part and fading up the edges of remaining blue paint, I got it all washed and wiped down with another several rounds of Sprayway.

A few places had bare metal peeking through, but for the most part, it was down to rust and factory paint.

I had some brown packing/craft paper laying around from various parts shipments and decided that would be good enough for masking the windows.

I started off with two or three coats of rust converter spray.

And then two coats of primer.

It was still early in the day, like 11:30AM, but the sun was out and the primer seemed to be drying in the air in between the can and the car body. There was a ton of over-spray. I got (what I thought would be) a lint-free cloth to wipe it down in between coats…

…but clearly that just made a mess. I went back inside and found a microfiber rag that did a great job cleaning the lint and dust off. The primer was still really textured, though and I wasn’t sure about the amount of time needed for that to properly set up, to withstand another wet sanding.

I put a thin coat of color on next.

And then another.

By this time, it was after 5:00PM and I didn’t want fresh paint getting wet overnight, so I decided to stop here.

After removing the masking:

After finding a decent color match with the Krylon Fusion All in One Matte Vintage Blue, which I sprayed in the spare tire well, I decided I should go buy another can or two to keep around. I went back to Lowe’s where I originally bought that paint and that whole line of paint was removed from the shelves, with no empty slots.

Looking on the Lowe’s website, the paint was still listed, but was marked unavailable. Further researching on the Krylon website, it looked like Ace Hardware was the only other place where it was available. Not knowing for certain what my paint plans are, I decided to stock up, and went around to every Ace Hardware in reasonable driving distance, from Candler to Swannanoa, and bought every can. In five stores (three didn’t stock it to begin with), I found ten cans.