It's ANZAC day today here in Australia so I'm on my second long
weekend in a row. In the week I had half-off before the Easter
break, and extending through said break, I just about managed to
get the main things I wanted to fix with my Jag done. Somewhat
disappointing because I thought eight days would have to be way
more time than I'd ever need, but rust repairs always seem to be
like that. The rust itself wasn't all that bad, but in a very
awkward spot around the necess that the rear window fits into. I
couldn't use my (knock-off) Dremmel in the space so I started off
sanding down the surface and then applying some rust converter
gell. The gell seemed to work on some areas but not others for
unknown reasons, so after a day of just waiting for it to do better
I ended up sitting there poking bits of sand paper in on the end of
a small screwdriver and rubbing back and forth that way.
No doubt a professional would have just determined that the rear
window had to come out so they could access the area properly, but
that's alright for them. For me I just had the endless game of
finishing cleaning off one small rust hole, then, with my
rust-spotting eye fully tuned, noticing a slight brownish tint to a
spot that I thought I'd done before, which of course then develops
into another hole. The spot has lots of different angles joining
and forming cavities, so it's all a mix of metal rusting from the
inside out and the outside in. Hopefully now I've sealed it all
off, though the originating problem of moisture getting trapped
under the window seal is obviously unavoidable (or is there perhaps
an oily type of sealer substance that I could put under there?).
I tried automotive spray paint for the first time, following a long
sequence of different cans. The colour match wasn't perfect,
probably matched to what the original paint looked like before
thirty years of Australian summers faded it (though not
unattractively). Once the morning dew clears today I'll have a go
at it with polish to at least try to soften the edge where it
overlaps the old paint work. As a test in advance of properly
painting the patch on the bonnet where I fixed up another rust spot
a few months ago, it's not ideal, but better than the killrust
undercoat that's on there now I suppose. I noticed a bit on
painting plastics in the book on bodywork repairs (The Haynes Car
Bodywork Repair Manual, an edition from the early 80s that I picked
up second-hand at a market) I've been following, so that could be
good for improving the faded plastic area below the front
windscreen. Apparantly the key is figuring out what type of plastic
it is - I guess if I'm lucky it's marked on there somewhere, but
I'm probably not.
The biggest disappointment came at the end when I pulled off the
masking tape (_very_ carefully, I might add) and many spots of
surrounding paint came off with it. The paint on the car body
itself seems to be OK, but for some reason the roof and the boot
lid have developed little round blisters in the top coat that want
to peel off. I expected s little bit of this, but it was really bad
in a spot right next to where I'd been working. Of course masking
off in order to spray paint over that bit is a catch-22, so I ended
up spraying paint into a tub and going over each spot with a fine
brush, which doesn't look very good, a spotty sort of effect, right
next to the nice(er) spray-painted area that I spent a day and a
half working on! Such is life.
One of these days I'll probably have to accept facts and get a full
respray, but from most angles it still looks good now, and the key
thing is that it's not rusting away. The other thing to figure out
is a new way of storing the car to avoid the trouble I have with
mice and rats. They love it in the engine compartment for some
reason, and even with daily baiting making sure they don't survive
long, there seems to be an constant supply coming in from the
paddocks. If anything the baits are just there to give them
something to eat in preference to bits of the Jag, most
significantly the wiring. Unfortunately that doesn't entirely work,
and I fear the day when they short out a wire in some place that's
near impossible to find. But designing and building a truely
mouse-proof structure that it's conventient to store a
regularly-driven car in is a really tricky task.
Between all that I made the mistake of leaving a tin of body filler
inside one evening, the smell from the recently-opened can
permeated the house through out the evening and I didn't really
notice except that the next day I had a terrible headache. So I
didn't do much work on the car. I did however bake a fourth batch
of shortbread, which is something that I have actually stuck at since
I mentioned my first batch in a post here a while ago.
Unfortunately I messed up the recipe, then over-cooked them -
headaches and baking don't go together, and the nausiating smell of
car body filler in the house was now replaced with the
barely-improved smell of burnt shortbread.
I never have been able to stand the taste of burnt food, so most
were inedible and the rest were pretty unenjoyable, though I
suffered through them seeing as my biscuit addiction still holds
strong. On Saturday though I did a fifth batch and they turned out
better than ever, so that's how it goes. They did again bake in
half the time of the first three batches, so I'm not sure whether I
was messing up the recipe somehow before, or perhaps more likely
the thermostat in the previously unused 40+ year old oven is
starting to work better with use.
