After a technical summary of the past Persian Kitty paint job and an analysis of Nonna’s current paint, the work officially began. I ‘m responsible for the disassembly, sanding, assembly, and repair of all trims for this project. That’s right, I would do everything except spraying the color.
Inspection
The real inspection begins at the beginning of the disassembly. No matter how many times you wash the car, you will not recognize hidden problems. First, the attachment parts were disassembled and sanded. This process was needed to find out which trims needed to be replaced. Putting it at the beginning gave enough time to prepare the parts for final assembly. We carefully selected some parts from Nonna and donors, but there were still some flawless stainless steel moldings missing. I took new ones from the inventory and ordered a few. When working on Nonna, I always maintained a certain communication with my grandmar, that is, what would she do? At the beginning, I decided to use all used parts because my grandma was a frugal person. If you bought her expensive clothes, her fist reaction might not suprise, but she would scold you for wasting money. Now we are going to buy her expensive moldings? So avoiding “waste” was the guiding ideology of working on Nonna.
But I keep thinking about the definition of “waste”. There aren’t enough used parts to reuse right now, and to save money I can wait until I get another low mileage donor at some point in the future. This leads to temporary compromises and repeated removals & installations. On the other hand, my fleet is close to full, and I now have 3 pre-facelifts, many unused NOS moudlings are still in our stock. If I continue to keep these NOS in storage instead of putting them on the spiritual vehicle of grandma, then it’s a true waste! I always care about cars very much, thus these parts are unlikely to be damaged or aged once installed. So it’s not a waste like buying expensive clothes for her. With proper care, the quality of these trims is almost lifelong.
So I decided to pull a new pair of front bumper moulding from stock, they are already expensive in other parts of the world. After counting and cleaning the attachment parts, I started putting them back on the car to check the fitment, mainly the front end. At the front end, the headlights, hood and fenders are movable, and their relationship can be very delicate, if one part is wrong you can’t get the gap to spec. First the filler of the left front fender cracked had negated itself, so we used another silver fender from the donor. This donor was specially prepared, and the same color would reduce some work.
Adjust the new fender according to WIS’s instructions, which is not difficult as long as the front has not been hit. First adjust the gap between the fender and the front door, then adjust the height of the front end of the fender. As long as the parts in this area are all original spec, the rest of the gaps will naturally fall into place. Of course, don’t expect the fenders of different cars to have the same bolt-on positions, they are destined to be different. After completing the driver’s side, the fenders on both sides are located in different relationships to the hood, and the passenger side is further back. The gaps don’t lie, the paint meter showed that it has more than 1800 µm of filler in some places, and there is some displacement due to the collision. But unfortunately, the silver donor also has filler in the same place. So I had to get a nearly flawless passenger side fender from a 1995 S 500 from Arizona, which was 199 metallic black.
With these in place it was time to align the lights, I had already prepared the pre-facelift lights and they looked good. The adjusted headlights were tested with a level ruler and even though the ground was not perfectly level, the two headlights were level with each other. So now we were only replacing the two fenders and not the doors as expected.
Sanding
After two years, what kind of new tools did I capture? Nothing fancy, this time it was all wet sanding, mainly a long block and a bunch of sandpaper. I also ordered Linear Blocks, they are still on the way, I decided to use them when polishing orange peels. Sanding started with the left front fender, which was my warm-up panel. This old part was reoainted, but the paint was not thick, around 200-300 µm. I tried to re-familiarize myself with sanding with this relatively simple panel.
Starting with #400, gradually I observed some high spots, so I went back to the coarser #240. I was still getting the feel of wet sanding during this process, so I spent more sandpaper and time than I should have. After I was satisfied with the silky smooth surface after sanding with #240, I moved on to #400. Some fillers were found during the sanding, and the final thickness of these areas was sanded to less than 150 µm, so it was acceptable. This way we already have a fairly silky smooth surface. In addition to the hard sandpaper and block, I also applied 3M sponge soft sandpaper to sand all the arcs, 140 is actually a fairly rounded design. Although it took a lot of time, I am satisfied with the first finished panel. Our painter, who is also my mentor, also approved.
The first panel took my whole day. Next day I moved to the left front door next to it. All panels were measured with a paint gauge before sanding to determine if they were worth working on and where attention was needed. The left front door was interesting, with only 130 µm of paint in some places and close to 400 µm in others, and a lot of surface rust. I thought it had been partially repaired, but found out during the work that it was more than that. During the sanding of the high spots, a black layer appeared next to the bare metal, which is the sign of a factory replacement door. These aftersales parts are black primered without the E-coat on the production line, and then need to be painted by the dealer.
But it still has some filler on the back, probably from adjusting the gap, or maybe it has been damaged later. The damage to the door is not serious, just a lot of rust, it seems that aftermarket doors (probably made in Holland or South Africa) cannot compare with factory doors. The left front door took quite a bit of time, at this time I tried to achieve smoothness by sanding down the existing paint. Because this paint is unlikely to shrink again, it is the best filler. It should be used well with the thickness left. The thickness of the door paint after sanding is between 120-160 µm.
When I thought the experience of the first two panels could be replicated, I encountered new troubles on the left rear door. The paint meter showed that there was a maximum thickness of 900 µm here, and about half of the area was more than 400 µm. These were fillers. I hesitated whether to remove these fillers. My mentor suggested that the filler area could be sanded to half the thickness and then connected to the other half of the door. So I used #80 to thin the filler, and here I made what I thought was my first mistake. When I found that the 900 µm area was still 700 µm after sanding flat, I decided to continue sanding harder, and then the pits of the sheet metal repair appeared. There are fillers where the left rear door and the left front door meet, mainly in the front half of the left rear door. Therefore, Nonna was hit on the left side again after getting the new left front door, mainly the left rear door. There are many signs of repairs and high spots. They tried to cover it with fillers, but it just made the whole area higher. I was a little confused about the next plan, so I decided to work on other panels first and decide whether to replace this door in the process.
It’s a new day. I chose another panel that connects to the previous work area, the hood. This area is large and has a lot of surface rust, so it’s expected to take a long time. I used a small dry sander to sand all the obvious or hidden rust. It’s impossible to find everything at once, so keep discovering them while sanding. I don’t like dry sanding, which will damage the metal sheet and increase the work of restoring the flatness. But after I wet sanded the first rust spot for 20 minutes, I found that there was no choice, they were deep. We had more than 30 rust spots in total. The sanding marks left by the dry sander were first removed by #240. When you sand a circle the size of a fingernail to the size of the palm of your hand, several layers of paint are magnified like the growth rings of a tree, and the car paint and bare metal can be connected smoothly. But on flat metal, 0 and 100 µm will never be even, we just turned a pit into a slope, so we still rely on primer to fill it.
In this endless polishing process, I have more patience than ever before, and it is a good motivation to connect cars with family. My grandma is certainly not a car, but this car has been considered by me in my heart as a kind of existence of her. All the thoughts about methodology come from this: if this is my grandma, how should I treat her? I am not a professional doctor, I may be an unlicensed self-taught, but I am very patient. If I can’t treat a car like my grandma well, what will happen to other cars? At least I can be sure that the money and time are passed in an undamaged way. I really can’t imagine handing the car to someone else. It’s like a medicals closing the door of the operating room. They say they will try their best, but cars are even more complicated than people. I don’t know if people have enough passion for these cars to work professionally. They are not Ferraris.
At the same time I started thinking about my grandpa. Grandpa died 16 years before grandma, and when he was alive, he was one of my favorite people, and we had so much fun together. Now we have kind of forgotten about him, and until we put grandma in his grave, I realized that we were burying beloved grandma with a photo of a nearly forgotten grandpa. After 16 years we are no longer sad, even though he deserved longer life. But hey, I also had a beloved grandpa, so this car is not only my grandma, she is my grandparents. There are two ways of death for people, one is the end of life, the other is being forgotten by the last person. The memories left by grandma will accompany my father and me. I believe that my father will always miss her. They spent 60 years together. As for me, I spent 14 years with grandpa and 30 years with grandma. How can I remember them for the rest of my life? Maybe this car is the best. But all this will disappear eventually. I am the youngest family member who has lived with my grandparents. When my memories no longer exist, they will officially leave this world, as if they had never existed. At that time, the meaning I gave to this car will no longer exist, and she will be free.
Thinking about this makes me more motivated to take everything I do at Nonna seriously. It’s not a job, it’s a calling. OK, where are we? I thought about this while sanding the hood, which took a long, long time. Although the hood has a lot of surface rust, there are no dent, so PDR is not even needed. Speaking of PDR, at this moment our painter is working on the original paint panel on the other side of the body, which has a lot of door dings. We started practicing PDR three years ago, and now he is experienced enough to work on our official restoration project.
Since our painter was doing PDR on the passenger side, I could only move to the rear. This is a bad area, but not much worse than most 140s. There is a lot of repaired corrosion near the trunk lid lock, which is the most common rust on the 140. The bad thing is that the previous repair cut the rusted part and installed a duplicate part, but the two parts were not seamlessly welded and there was an overlapping area. In order to fill this step and make it as natural as possible, they used a huge amount of filler, which extended all the way to the side of the fender. After removing this filler, we inevitably got a step. This step was hammered in, but there must be a gap, which we will fill with metal repair compound later.
The trunk lid had a massive amount of dents on the top, seems the driver of this car always closed the trunk with his fist. The reason for the painstaking PDR rather than using a replacement part was that there were only similar or worse trunk lids on the market, including our low mileage donors, and after comparing several we decided to keep the original. This trunk lid had also been painted twice, and the top clear coat had cracks. So after the initial PDR I started to remove thickness, mainly to remove the cracked clear coat, otherwise these scratch-like cracks would continue to remain on the new paint. Use #240 and micron down to 150 µm, still thicker. This is to use these car paints as a natural filler, and later sanding they can make up for the lack of PDR.
The left rear fender was also repainted once, not as thick as I think, but also had some filler at the wheel arch. A PDR had been done before sanding this area, and a small dent could not be removed due to the interlayer at the edge of the wheel arch. The rear fender is the largest area, stretching from the trunk through the roof to the A-pillar, and it takes a lot of time. During this process, the windshield should be protected with PVC film in advance to avoid scratches, and I also cleaned the dirt in the windshield groove in advance. Due to the prevalence of defects, there was a lot of effort on the left rear wheel arch, and perhaps I should have just used paint thinner to remove all the paint, which might have been more efficient. The dent in this area will eventually be filled with filler, and this is the first filler location.
Now that the rear fender and front doors surrounded the left rear door, we had to decide what to do to proceed. Okay, I knew it was going to be a hassle to swap parts of both doors, Nonna has rear seat adjustment, door closing assistance, and BOSE stereo, the donor has nothing. This meant that in addition to the mechanical elements, the wiring harness also had to be reinstalled, that was everything. Plus it’s necessary to put everything back to the donor so it will endure the rain. Since we were only replacing the doors, the Hematite anodized trim with a consistent fade and number matching side window also had to be retained so that there would be no trim that was a different color. With the help of the painter, it took us about 3 hours to disassemble both doors and reassemble all the parts, and it was worth it. The replacement door was nearly flawless in its original paint, just requiring some quick PDR and sanding.
I also considered replacing the left front door, the donor also had an original paint one. The important thing is that Nonna’s left front door is not original, nor is the side window, that piece of glass was made in 1997, the rest of the glass is from 1992 and 1993. I almost decided to at least replace the period correct glass, but oh dear, it seems like part of her history. What happened to her? We don’t know yet. Let’s just keep this in mind for now, maybe I’ll change my mind later and restore the original door and glass. If we replace the glass back, I will quickly forget this interesting detail.
The passenger side was much easier to work on, we had two doors and rear fenders in original paint, plus the front fender from an Arizona S 500. For a 1994 delivery car, it is astounding that the fenders have never been scratched in the last 30 years, with only two minor dents, I imagine this car has been in a remote and quiet part of Arizona for a long time. After the PDR it was almost flawless, but fitement was an issue. I was concerned about how different the sheet metal would be between the 1994 and 1993 cars, since Nonna and the donor were only 2 months apart, they were even different. This fender took a lot of time to install and adjust, it is much higher than the right front door where it joins. 140s usually have this problem, but this one was quite severe, and we had no good solution for it, so it was installed as is. The #400 was easy.
The two right doors are also original paint, of course, no one has ever worked on these 30 year old doors, they are full of parking lot dents. Our painter has already finished the PDR on the passenger side while I worked on the rest of the panels. These two doors have a few spots of surface rust, so there was some extra work there as well. Overall it only takes 2 hours to get a door like this from #240 to multiple #400 to silky smooth, maybe even half an hour if there are no rust spots, so how important it is to work on a complete car! The sheet metal on the Octavius ​​is the best of all the cars we have worked on, with only 1 small dent. After the restoration he is displayed in our workshop as a benchmark, I am very much hoping that Nonna can achieve the same results. We are actually not starting too badly, we have only applied filler in 1 spot so far.
Since the paint on the right side has never been repaired, it naturally has more rust spots. This is especially noticeable on the top of the right fender. There is a lot of rust spots on the edges of the door and fender, which is a difficult area. Sanding edge rust tends to make the paint on the edge completely disappear, rather than making the edge and panel smooth. And since we have thoroughly cleaned the interior, the stains caused by sanding the edges will inevitably enter the interior again. Even if we do a lot of protection for the interior, the interior is still stained. There will also be difficulties when applying primer filler later, how to get the primer into the gap evenly.
The roof was the last panel to go, and due to its large size it was physically divided into 4 areas to work on. I removed the windshield trim and cleaned the gullies beforehand so there wouldn’t be a constant stream of mud running out. The first thing to do was to remove the funny one-off sunroof, and I was surprised to find that the paint underneath was intact. At the same time, I was sad to find that there were also rust spots hidden under the paint on the roof, about 10 in total. We didn’t even plan to paint the roof at first, as t was theoretically untouched. But now our painter jokes that this could be a small workshop assembled 140, it has small rust spots everywhere. That’s what I was thinking too, this car even lacks E-coat on the radiator frame.
The #400 sanding process includes the work of partial #240, the main purpose of which is leveling. Then comes #800, which can also be leveled, and its main purpose is to sand off the #400 sandpaper pattern. All the above work took me about 90 hours, plus some work by the spray painter, the overall work is more than 100 hours. The pre-primer filler sanding is an important foundation, and its time accounts for 2/3 of the total sanding time. I think it is also important. At present, we are doing well. The important thing is that this time because there is no time limit, I can improve the places that I think have more potential as I please. It can be said that on the surface of all panels, I have done the best I can. This is not only my own boasting, but also has been verified by our painter.
More to continue next week.