TEAR DOWN
HERE WE GO
This next few pages are going to be long. If you've ever worked on a project like this, you probably smirked to yourself reading that. One thing leads to another, which leads to another, and so on so go grab a beer and get settled in.
PAINT PROBLEMS
So remember that part when I said I was just going to wrap it myself? Ok good so see that picture up there how on the floor there's a flap of vinyl with several layers of paint still attached to it, but not anywhere close to being attached to the car?
In most cases, and in my experience all cases, it's pretty easy to remove vinyl. Time consuming for sure, but really it's pretty easy. So approaching this car shouldn't be any different. Except it was way the hell, all the way different. I started with the door. I picked at one of the corners and started peeling up the vinyl. It had tension on it. Of course it did - it's adhesive and takes a little effort, but all of a sudden it peeled up super fast, like I've never seen or felt before. Know why though? Because it peeled up the top layer of paint at the same time. What. The fuck. Look at that picture up there. I peeled up the rest of the vinyl and this is what I found.
The car was originally a light blue. I know this because the inside of the engine bay still had this paint color as well as several hard-to-repaint areas. It used to be blue, for sure. At some point, someone repainted it with a very similar but not the same shade of blue. Prior to that, they primed it too. And did some bodywork/bondo. In one fell swoop, I uncovered 5 different and additional layers of work to be done. Vinyl, topcoat, primer, bondo, topcoat, primer again. The only thing I can figure is that the original topcoat wasn't prepped prior to the repaint. Someone just sprayed primer over it. That doesn't work. Then, before applying topcoat to said primer never bothered to wipe down all the primer dust - or, as you'll read later didn't re-coat or top-coat within the proper timeframe, so when I peeled up the vinyl the newer topcoat and primer came right along with it.
This issue applied to the entire car. There was not a single part of the car that the paint was adhered properly, and the entire car was covered in vinyl.
See this is a huge problem. People tend to think that you can slap vinyl over imperfect paint and it'll look good again like it's a car Band-Aid. Instead, it just accentuates the imperfections and makes your vinyl look like ass. So the idea of pulling the old vinyl and replacing it with my own just got crushed and all of a sudden I'm in really deep.
On top of that, now I see all the Bondo work. The promising thing is that there wasn't that much of it, and what there was actually was done pretty well, but judging by the material color, with the improper type of Bondo. Which meant... another thing to address. After coming to terms with this, I realized that this would give me the opportunity to see about hammering out some of the dings and dents from the inside too, and minimizing the amount of body filler I'd end up having to use. Good.
THE NEXT 2 WEEKS
I'm a night owl. I hate getting up early and I love staying up late. So every single night for 2 weeks, I was out in the garage with a sixer, some music, and a shit ton of tenacity. From 8PM to 2AM, I peeled vinyl and used a straight-blade to scrape off every single bit of paint from that car. It was oddly satisfying due to how bad the previous paintjob was - it was so poorly adhered to the original paint that with almost no force, the blade would glide across the surface and peel up the paint in large sections, and that is for the areas that the vinyl didn't just do that job for me. The Datsun Gods were looking out for me. The only real challenge was the edges and corners which definitely took a little more finesse, and still I could never really get as much paint off as I needed.
One step at a time then. Every time I came across an area that I couldn't quite get the paint off, I removed parts until I could.
SO MANY PIECES
That meant I took the door handles off. An the locks. And the window frames. And the trim. And the doors. And the hatch, the hood, the vents, the bumper cover, the door panels, the lights, the headlight shrouds, the windshield, the hatch glass, quarter windows, badges, emblems, wiper blades, mirror (yes singular this car only has 1 rearview mirror) just friggin everything. I had parts all over the place because the paint was bad. I learned a life lesson in those 2 weeks.
If ever you're going to do something, do it the right way the first time.
When I took the tires off, I finally found the rust. I knew it existed. It had to. And I wanted to find it. Some people are totally fine going through life and being ok with the "You don't know what you don't know" mindset. This drives me crazy - I have to know. There was rust on this car, and I had to know where it was or I'd never get it off my mind.
There was a small section inside the front drivers-side wheel well that had rust. Again, just like when I discovered the Plasti-Dip I poked it with my finger and it went straight through. Well shit. But - and you can see this in the pictures below, it's part of a piece that's welded to the frame rail from the factory. And it's a common rust spot. So common in fact that they sell replacement pieces to weld right back in, so not a huge deal at all. Curiosity got the best of me. If that spot was rusted, what about the inside of the frame rail? What might be in there that would be disastrous? I stuck my phone in there and took a few photos so I could inspect it. The inside of the frame rail was bone dry. Only the slightest surface rust, no damage, no issues at all. I was able to clean that up with a long wire brush attached to a power drill, and hit it with some rattle can primer to protect it. Phew! Dodged a bullet there for sure.
IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS
I had these parts everywhere. In the garage, in the car, in my basement - just all over the place. It was a ton of work tear that thing apart, but there are several positives here.
Firstly, there's no better way to familiarize yourself with a project like this than getting balls deep into it. Because of what I did in those 2 weeks, I know every single square inch of this car. I know with all certainty that there are no hidden issues, nothing that was hidden from me, and that anything that needed to be addressed I could address the right way. I also knew exactly what imperfections it had, and it gave me the opportunity to weigh out if, when and how I wanted to or needed to address them.
On top of that, as I reflected on just how long this would take (and I have no patience by the way, I'm of the Millennial generation and want everything right now) it struck me that every single bolt I removed came out easily. I didn't break or strip a single fastener. This car was 42 years old and every single bolt, nut and screw was removable as if it just came off the factory floor. Some were oxidized, but zero were rusted. This to me seemed like dark magic. I've never worked on a car in my life that didn't have parts rust-welded together. A true miracle - all hail the Datsun Gods.
PLASTI-DIP
If I didn't make this clear, I hate this stuff. It's nightmare fuel for me now. As I went through and removed piece after piece, I kept uncovering sections of Plasti-Dip. It was everywhere. And the overspray was everywhere. It turns out that at some point somebody painted the ENTIRE CAR with it. Yes... the entire car. Someone out there actually thought "Hey I have a good idea. I'm going to cover an entire classic car in rubbery spray film I think it would look great." Lucky for me I didn't have to peel Plasti-Dip from an entire car, but it was under the tail light panels, in the wheel wells, under various trim pieces... I hate it. To this day, I still have non-biodegradable pieces of fucking Plasti-Dip strewn about my lawn from that day. I get PTSD every time I see them as I mow the lawn.
After all that work, somehow I was still motivated. Actually, even more motivated. I got real intimate with this car, and it treated me well this entire time, almost like it knew I was only trying to help. I could feel myself becoming attached to it - I was going to make it mine and do it my way. I had a picture in my head with exactly what I wanted it to look like on the other side and I was determined to get there, come hell or high water.
There then came a stretch of pretty cold weather. It was nearing the end of March and we had a bit of a cold snap, so being in the garage wasn't super appealing, but I still wanted to work on the car.