Cleaning Off the Blank Gunk- Part 2

Well, its been a while since my last post, but don't worry I've not been slacking off on the car. Much has been done and I'll be bringing the blog up to speed over the next few posts, but first that awful black gunk.

Well after MANY hours of cold, painful, messy, smelly and down right vile work the bottom of the car was cleaned completely of all the black gunk. Now, the guy selling the car to me in the US had assured me that this was a spray on black "rhino hide" coating which they use on the beds of their trucks over there. Great I thought, googling the name and finding that its tough, strong and most importantly water proof.

Well, what a load of rubbish. This was far from Rhino hide paint, but was in fact a bitumen spray on coating which was applied to quite a few DeLoreans when they arrived in the US back in the 80's. It tended to be applied to those cars destined for the east or northern parts of the USA. While it was designed to protect that mild steel and epoxy coated frame, and indeed it did, time often means that water finds its way in and, with the black coating covering it the resulting damage can be harder to see. Not to mention its a messy, horrible coating which gums up all the bolts, parts and fixings under the car.

Well, in order to fix any rust of flaking epoxy on 10719 I needed to get it off. So, armed with loads of rags, paper towel and white spirit I went to work. The best technique I found was to put the white spirit into a spray bottle and spray a mist over the area to be cleaned. I then attacked this with a kitchen sponge, removing layer after layer.



One half cleaned off!



It was slow and painful work, but I slowly got back to the original epoxyy. I was doing this in January in the UK, with temperatures falling well below freezing. I had over eight layers on at one point, and was still freezing cold! Laying on a cold concrete floor doesn't help, especially when your working under a two tonne car. However, I did get another set of stands so I could get both ends of the car right up in the air and all four wheels off. 

I managed to get it all off, and in turn revealed a few bits of flaky epoxy that needed work. The main part was where the leaking oil from the transmission had exposed the metal on the engine cradle. It seems to just be surface rust, so I'll clean it back and probably paint in POR-15 grey. Soon be a s good as new!