Ah, so it’s already week 22. It’s going to seem like this progress happens pretty quickly, but I can assure you it definitely did not happen like that for me. I’m not really sure how many hours I’ve spent just sanding on these body panels so far, but 25 hours is a very conservative number. Every time I thought I finally got a spot smooth, I’d clean it off and run my finger over it again and oh I was wrong.
Body Work
The last big to-do item left with this car, at least for its current iteration, is to get the paint figured out. It could be a hell of a lot worse, but it does have some issues. The hood has almost no paint left but it is at least giving some moss a good home, the driver’s side fender is missing a big stip of clear coat that got destroyed by the sun, the driver’s door has a bunch of paint missing on its kick panel, the front bumper needs some body filler plus paint, and there are a few small rust spots throughout the body that need addressing. Here’s where we started a few weeks ago.
The Hood
The first part I decided to tackle is the hood. It seemed like a good place to start and test out my methodology before I get to other body panels with a lot more curves and tricky spots. There was a ton of corrosion and UV damage that had happened over the years and ended up leaving the hood with the feeling of about 60 or 80 grit sandpaper. Enough to make your skin crawl when you ran your hand across it.
I started out by hitting it with 220 grit sandpaper on a sanding block by hand to see (and feel, mainly) how the wildlife was reacting to the abrasive and pressure. I quickly realized that, at my current pace, it would take me until retirement to get this to a point I’d be happy painting it. Upon a quick check of my age and retirement savings, I decided this wouldn’t work. Electric palm sander and more 220 to the rescue!
The electric sander helped a ton, but no tool takes all of the work out of the … work, so I still ended up spending a loooong time sanding, checking the area with my hand and eyeballs, switching to a higher grit, realizing I still needed to knock it down with a heavier grit, rinse and repeat. At this point, it doesn’t honestly look that different than the 50/50 picture I took, but everything is flat and smooth now, or at least mostly so. I still need to go back over everything with a 600 grit and maybe 1000 grit to really give the new paint a good foundation.
The Fenders
As mentioned previously, the driver’s side front fender needed some TLC. The upper edge of the panel had most of the clear coat totally destroyed and the lower right side (when looking directly at the panel) had some rust along the body line transition to the kick panel. Not only that, but there were a ton of small dings that I didn’t want to keep if we didn’t need to. Here’s what we started with, roughly.
After, you guessed it, a ton of sanding and some body filler, this is roughly what it looks like now. I know I need to put at least one more layer of body filler on in a few small spots, but after that it should mainly just be sanding everything down to where I want it.
Also, here’s that area I was talking about near the body line transition area.
I might be hard to tell in the pictures, but there are a ton of pretty deep scratches all over that entire area. I ended up sanding this down a lot more, then doing my best to put an appropriately thick layer of bondo on top.
There was some rust along the crease in the body that starts right out of frame in the above picture, which I tackled next. Same idea as everything with this body work: assess, sand, sand, sand, prime, body filler (optional), sand.
Luckily, the rust was just surface level and hadn’t spread very far at all. I was pretty easily able to sand out to clean metal and prime the whole area, so we should be good to go with some feathering once paint happens.
Front Bumper
Out of all the panels I have worked on so far, the front bumper takes the cake as the worst, though now I wonder if it technically counts as a body panel… Anyhoo, when I mounted the bumper a few weeks ago I noticed that there appeared to be a pretty thick layer of body filler under the paint which, coupled with the noticeable dent in the center near the license plate, makes me think the previous owners bumped into at least a few different things, a few different times.
Being curious, and having no idea what I’m actually doing, I started chipping that body filler off to see what was underneath. Well, surprise, a very flexible plastic bumper is underneath, and now if I would try to paint it, anytime it flexed for any reason it would try to crack the new paint. So, I guess I need to keep my eye out for a used NA Miata bumper that’s in decent shape as a long term fix, short term fix being do my best with a thin layer of bondo and some paint.
Quarter Panel Surprise
Having given up for the day on the rest of the car under the guise of letting the bondo cure, I walked around the car looking for trouble spots that I will need to deal with at some point. I remembered there being a small rust spot on the passenger’s side rear quarter panel but wasn’t sure how much work would be involved to properly fix it.
Doesn’t look to bad, right? No, it looks terrible. The paint was already splitting (?!) because of the rust I’m sure has been displacing it for a few years now, plus it looked like there had possibly been a repair done here a few years ago because pieces of what appeared to be body filler were easily chipped/pulled off with your finger. Behold.
Ok, I wasn’t quite expecting that. I was really hoping it was going to be a quick fix, but I don’t think I’m going to be that lucky this time. To make sure this rust doesn’t keep spreading, I need to keep expanding this hole until I see untouched metal, then sand all the rust away and seal it.
This was definitely a repair job, probably done at an at least halfway decent shop because the paint matching and body filling actually looked pretty dang good. Unfortunately, they didn’t do something right, or someone dinged it here a few years ago, because here we are again. At this point, I had spent a lot of time sanding with a ton of different grits of sandpaper, power and unpowered sanding devices, as well as the world’s smallest wire wheel on a rotary tool to get this result. Time to hit it with some primer, then wait for it to cure before going after it with body filler.
The body filler hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not sure when it will.
What’s Next
This is where we are as of writing this. I think I need to take it to a doctor, because it apparently has some sort of disease. Maybe Chickenpox?
There’s not much I feel like is worth doing right now mechanically, as I can’t really take it on long shake down runs without the registration and insurance all worked out (which should be happening soon, I hope). Without those, I don’t want to just replace random stuff that may break, because at that point I might as well just buy a new Miata.
Until we can get it 100% legal, I’ll just keep throwing elbow grease and sandpaper at the various parts that need it and hope for the best, with the occasional spin around the block thrown in there for good measure. I’m also keeping my eye out for a sale on a decent radio that isn’t going to catch fire, which the 3 most popular super cheap stereos on Amazon apparently do?!? Why do people keep buying them if every 1 in 100 (or less) catches fire? I will freely admit I’m a pretty risk-adverse guy, but surely most people aren’t willing to gamble a $10-20 price difference for potential fiery death. Right?
Out of My Element 