I just found this site and was amazed that there IS a forum for car detailing...wish I had known that a little over a year ago when I first started my project.
But I am nowhere near done and am thankful I found this wealth of information.
I bought, sight unseen, a 91 Eunos roadster, first generation Miata with right hand drive. It had been sitting outside for over 3years under poplars dripping sap, with a trickle charger on it, at the time I came to pick it up it was buried in a snow bank, all you could see of it was the underside of the back bumper and one wheel.
It took over three hours to dig it out, the wheels were encased in ice and shovels, picks, hair dryers and copious buckets of hot water were needed to get them loose.
I only realized that it was right hand drive when I had shovelled the "driver's side" free so I could open the door... at that point I thought I was suffering from oxygen deprivation...WHA????
The interior was festooned with cobwebs....UGH! I HATE cobwebs and normally would not have even considered getting into the car until they were all GONE...but shovelling the car out had taken the best hours of daylight, it was getting dark and I had a two hour drive home in front of me
I didn't know where the gas cap release control was, best setting for heater controls (the inside of the windshield immediately becamefoggy and stayed that way for quite some time until I figured it out), how to get the headlights to flip up and then there was the left handed shifting thing which I had neverdone either.
Oh...and the drifting into oncoming traffic thing because my brain kept reporting that "I" was not sitting properly in relationship to the road was fun TOO!
The next day was heart breaking, seeing this in daylight.
What you see here is NOT a dusty car, it is a baked on coating of sheer MUNG!
Three years of being parked directly under poplar trees had resulted in gobs of tree sap, some were two inches long, some had actually crystallized...the paint was FILTHY, oxidized, scratched up and certainly did not look like British RacingGreen anymore. What looks like dust on the paint wasn't! It was a thick coat of STUFF with dust and tree sap embedded IN it.
I almost had a heart attack when I opened the hood, it was STUFFED with leaves, why it did not catch fire is beyond me and honestly I felt really stupid about not checking it before I started it. I took out three 8 gallon shop vac bags of leaves out of there and they were still floating out for weeks afterward.
Looking at this car I was sure a paint job was going to be in order, there was absolutely no rust on it anywhere that I could see but I figured that since I had no real idea of what needed to be done on this car,body OR engine, the best thing to do would be to CLEAN it first.
It's a ZEN thing...just take things apart and clean them,notice details, figure things out, make notes of what you find, whether or not you understand what they are or what they do or how they come apart.
CLEANING...that's the ticket.
Engine compartment first because I have found that if something starts to go you won't notice the small details of it if your engine is dirty,if it is clean, oil leaking or water hoses about to let go are evident.
I first wrapped all the electricals in plastic and tinfoil,pre-scrubbed the engine compartment using degreaser and pressure washed the entire engine compartment, then it was scrubbed again with degreaser and a final pressure wash.
Everything that was bolted onto the firewall that didn'thave hoses that might be kinked were removed one by one.
All wiring harnesses, all relays and electrical connectors were wiped down, each connector was unplugged to clean the contacts as well as the cases and as I took each piece off, I washed the paint underneath and waxed it before bolting the piece back on. Any ground wire connector was removed, cleaned off, the firewall at those points were slightly sanded to allow better contact
Coolant overflow tank, windshield washer pump and tank, airfilter box, air intake hoses were all removed and cleaned inside and out.
If something looked wrong or was broken I went to the internet and figured out what (first of all) it WAS and then how to get it offand replace it. the first thing I noticed was the thermostat housing had abroken sensor, looked it up, ordered and replaced it.
The engine was scrubbed and the valve covers were also scrubbed and polished, not as nicely as i would have liked but hey...I wanted to DRIVE it.
At that point, I moved to the interior and scrubbed everything I could reach, washed the inside of the soft top and lubricated everything I could reach.
Then I started on the paint job...washed the entire car witha really good detergent and started on the tree sap.
Nothing I tried worked; I have a cabinet filled with the best tar removers I could find, but nothing worked...NOTHING!
There were over 283 gobs of tar on that car, (what can Isay? You need to know what you're up against) some of them had dropped, gotten dust on them,then froze and then the next year, more gobs on top of the old ones with dust...well...three years of that
Finally I bought heavy duty nail polish remover to try, and it softened the sap! but then I saw that it had also etched the paint when itpooled around the gob of tree sap.
But it WORKED!
So off I went to buy a box of 500 Q-tips, and then got a bucket or really hot water and detergent and lots of rags.
I spent the next three days, dipping Q-tips into the acetone, twirling onto the sap and then rubbing with the Q-tip until I could see the tip of it was saturated with sap and washed the gob and immediate area right away with a MF cloth and hot soapy water. Although there was some etching still, they were certainly not as bad as my first attempt.
Meanwhile, our shop cat who weighs in around 18 pounds was curious as to what I was up to so he jumped up onto the hood, then slipped and fell off, not before leaving claw marks ALL the way down the front of the hood...I could have SHOT him!
Well it really WAS time to do something about the paint job!
I bought a Porter machine and McGuire's 105 and 205 cutting compound, a double bucket system with grit guard and a pad washer system and went to work.
Rinsed car again, foamed it, used MF wash mitt, rinsed, checked the finish, foamed it again and used new MF wash mitt for spots missed.
Taped off all the trim and then started working on the paint, which took 5 days...mostly because I was apprehensive of doing something wrong,
It was truly an amazing experience watching the color come up and the scratches disappear, swirls and all, even the cat claw marks disappeared.
Sealed, waxed and polished again....ready to take my first cruise!!!
At this point, I have the entire interior gutted, dash, wiring, carpet all out (haven't found any rust yet!!!)and am going to clean the interior metal and seal it before reassembling everything. The leather seats were torn so they came out; I found some used seats for sale and bought the covers from them to take apart and I am hand stitching them back together into my seat covers in my spare time.
And then one more go over the paint job before hitting the road sometime in July.
