Soda blasting is something best done either in a very well extracted booth or in a very open space – neither of which applies to a garage outside your home. Basically when used dry the dust from the soda is like a very fine dust that is airborne for quite some time before settling. We used over 300kg of soda blast media from Armex and all of this had to be swept up after use. Messy.
However the results are superb – the process is very gentle and can be used to strip one layer at a time away from the surface. Even better the surface is not scratched like sand blasting or grinding would – this means the risk of flash rust is non existent if the original metal treatment of panels is preserved. The whole body and parts took 2 whole days to complete.
The engine cover came up very well with a lot of the original colouring to the bare metal;
The doors and detail of the door shut area. We’ll have to remove the door screw plugs before painting. The heater channels all came up perfectly – no rust or rot at all.
The area above the fuel tank. We chose to leave some of the original pearl white paint as it was not rusted and more importantly we don’t need a perfect finish in there – just a single consistent colour throughout the car. The engine cover drip tray can be seen resting where the fuel tank would normally sit. There were 3 small rust holes near the drain tubes or holes under the front windscreen rubber location – an easy weld?
Close up of the metal filler around the rear section for the the hood. Sand blasting or grinding would remove a lot of this material making it necessary to replace. There is some advantage to soda blasting.
The bonnet still shows some of the rust spotting visible at purchase. The lighter areas are where there was filler. The blasting removes filler but not the rusty areas – these will have to be addressed with a more aggressive blasting media. Either spot blasting with sand or letting the whole bonnet go through a sand blasting firm.
When blasting the wings it became clear that the same white paint was not to be found here. These wings could be replacement items? They also came up a different bare metal colour so there is a little doubt as to whether they’re original. Some evidence of filler too. We’ll have to compare the curves around the headlight bowl with those on Beryl’s as we know these will be original.