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 Post subject: Floor rust
PostPosted: Fri Sep 06, 2013 7:29 pm 
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Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2012 6:48 pm
Posts: 387
Location: Stamford, CT
Finally tackling the rust on the floors and other small rust spots in other areas on the car before it goes up for sale. The rusting on the floors has gotten worse in the past few months and at one point I even found an inch of water in the car :cry: (the next day I bought a tarp and bungee cords). The floors still seem solid but we'll see after I do some wire wheeling. So far I plan on doing the following for the floors over the next few days if the rust isnt worse than I think it is:

1. Remove the tar soundproofing from the passenger side. Driver side just peeled right off and im hoping tomorrow when its 10° warmer ill be able to do the same.

2. Wire wheel and brush all the loose rust and scale off and get down to bare metal

3. Apply 3 coats of Rust-Mort rust converter. Another phosphoric acid rust converter but converts rust to a paintable finish and doesnt harm clean metal.

4. Prep for paint with primer. Not sure if necessary but I dont think it can hurt any

5. Paint a couple of coats of Rustoleum

6. Spray bedliner. Not positive on this step since the floors shouldnt be seeing any moisture after I get weatherstripping for the doors, but Id rather be safe than sorry.

After that Ill start tackling the other small rust spots around the car.
Album with all the rust spots: https://picasaweb.google.com/1060562097 ... -MvNSFnAE#

Some pics of the drivers side floor(wet/dark spots on the floors are oil):
Image
Image
Image

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71' 240Z: HLS3040666


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Sep 06, 2013 7:56 pm 
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Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 5:53 pm
Posts: 14779
Location: CT
All our floors looked worse than that when we first began restoring our Zs. Your plan sounds excellent and exceeds what I did to mine. Peel the vinyl and jute back far enough not to interfere with the wire wheel, and have a vacuum tube running in that footwell as you wire wheel it; that saves you a lot of rust dust.

The real danger for rust comes from the UNDERSIDE of the car, especially the passenger side (since that side's always exposed to the wet street gutters, and the exhaust travel closer to the driver's side to help dry it out).

I used RhinoLiner for the underside of my car, and plain RustOleum for the inside floors. Pop those rubber drain plugs out before you start and toss them into your dishwasher (don't tell Mom). Be sure to replace them in the same holes.

Frank

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1970 240Z


Last edited by Frank T on Sat Sep 07, 2013 7:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Sep 06, 2013 8:52 pm 
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Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2012 6:48 pm
Posts: 387
Location: Stamford, CT
Frank, your words and approval have given me some more hope and motivation for tomorrow. Ill be sure to take plenty of pictures along the way and post them.

This may be one of the last things I end up doing on this car since winters coming, im low on $$$ and this is my daily driver. Im probably going to list it for sale and depending on how much its worth on the market, I might hold onto it or sell it and get a beater car and another cheaper Z from outside the NE.

Should I also be wire wheeling the bottom? I wasnt planning on it and I also have this stuff on the bottom of my car: Image

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2013 7:53 am 
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Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 5:53 pm
Posts: 14779
Location: CT
NO! If I remember your Z's undercarriage looked excellent ~ it has been undercoated, so don't fix what ain't broken. That top surface rust inside the car will eat the floors away slowly tho, so you must remove that. Your plan sounds good. Effectively, you will be removing all the interior rust, coating the bare metal with RustOleum, and thereby sandwiching good metal btwn to layers of protectant.

Also, wire-wheeling the underside of a Z is a royal PITA, since you 'wear' everything which comes off the car (and pieces of flying wire). It's dirty and actually dangerous to your eyesight. Glad you don't have to do that to yours.

When you found that water in the car, which side was it on?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2013 8:38 am 
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Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2013 3:42 pm
Posts: 282
Location: Rochdale, MA
Once you get down to bare metal, I wouldn't use cheap old rustoleum. I would use a POR-15. If you are going to tackle this job do it once. The rustoleum will not hold up as well as POR-15.

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Datsun 260Z
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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Sep 07, 2013 12:45 pm 
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Location: Stamford, CT
The water was on both sides of the car. Usually when its supposed to rain I try and use some tape or a garbage bag over the doors to keep water out but there was a heavy rain I wasnt expecting and I got to the car after it had been raining all night and all afternoon. I have no weatherstripping between the door and the side glass so theres a sizable gap for rain to get in.
padam07 wrote:
Once you get down to bare metal, I wouldn't use cheap old rustoleum. I would use a POR-15. If you are going to tackle this job do it once. The rustoleum will not hold up as well as POR-15.


I didnt go with POR-15 for a couple of reasons. The first is that I want to get rid of all the rust before painting and ive heard that POR doesnt really like to stick to clean metal and when it does stick its very hard to remove. I could see myself turning POR into a huge mess and its not very cheap either so I dont want to have to do it twice.

The other reason is that the floors wont be seeing any action especially after I get some weather stripping. All the rustoleum/bedliner will have to do is exist and keep water away from the metal. On the exterior I would want to use POR15 but at least in my eyes the interior should be more than ok with a few good thick coats of rustoleum

DRIVEWAY EDIT: The sound deadening material on the passenger floors is kicking my butt. Nowhere near as easy as the driver side
DOUBLE DRIVEWAY EDIT: Thought I found a solution that would have the tar stuff peel up without a problem but I guess not. Havin trouble finding dry ice retailers close by :?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:14 pm 
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Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2012 6:48 pm
Posts: 387
Location: Stamford, CT
Freezing did not work for me. For some reason the sound deadening stuff on the passenger side was much more difficult to get off. Poured a soup of gasoline and mineral spirits on the sound deadening material and left it over night. Drained it today and was able to chisel away at the majority of the rest of it. The soup softened it up a bit to something I could work with. Tomorrow I can clean up the remaining tar stuff with mineral spirits and a light wire brush. Any idea what I should be doing with the transmission tunnel? Its covered in the same material along with some nasty padding but im not sure if I should paint higher up than a couple inches off of the floor.

Image
Image

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 7:47 pm 
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Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 5:53 pm
Posts: 14779
Location: CT
In my personal experience, I've never encountered a rusty transmission tunnel. Floorboards are the problem.

For what it's worth, I would never recommend using gasoline as a cleaning fluid in my car. It's simply too easy to ignite and there are other solutions which do a better job. The thought of sparking a gasoline fire inside my Z gives me the willies, and the smell lasts forever.

Your passenger floor looks like it might have already been coated with something; that could be why it's so hard to remove. The floormats and jute padding should simply lift out, leaving complete access to the painted floorboards. I think someone sprayed or painted something else in there, maybe to hold the jute down? If that side has already been treated, I would just spray over it now, rather than make sparks with a wheel trying to take it back down to bare metal. I don't see any rust on that side to deserve a wheel, anyway.

Pop out those rubber plugs while you're scraping around in there. That will allow the scraps to drop out of the car, and preserve the plugs (which are becoming hard to get).

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 9:31 pm 
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Location: Stamford, CT
I tried a lot of things yesterday all of them very flammable :shock: I tried using a hair dryer but that didnt really do much so I thought Id go the opposite direction. People told me to use dry ice, but you cant buy it in grocery stores here like you can in other places so I thought one of the chemicals I had in the garage should be able to speed up the process.
My Results:
-Mineral spirits turned the tar into goop(the parts it could touch. Id be able to scrape the top part of the tar or clean it from metal, but not do both)
-Starting fluid seemed to speed up the process substantially but eventually lost its effectiveness for some reason
-Gas+acetone mixture I had laying around seemed to work a little worse than starting fluid(also tried desolvit with no success, but it covered the smells of all those chemicals with a citrus smell. Not that I noticed until today since I was wearing a respirator).

Heres a video I took from yesterday:
https://picasaweb.google.com/1060562097 ... 9503621650

Everything but the mineral spirits started to lose effectiveness as I worked towards the middle. Bought some compressed air to try and freeze the tar (actually difluoroethane/freon R-152a in a can) but that just made it more difficult to separate from the metal. The driver side took 5 minutes to pull off and the passenger side is probably going to take around 5 hours total to clean up. The only thing that I think couldve made a difference is that I poured acetone all over that side to help evaporate the water when I was drying up the pool in the car, a marvel mystery oil spill (neither of those helped on the other side), and the exhaust running on the driver side. Im just glad its nearly gone and Ill probably get to using the rust converter tomorrow.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 10:02 pm 
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Joined: Sun Dec 02, 2012 9:26 am
Posts: 219
Location: Jamestown, RI
I went through a similar experience when I was removing the old Ziebart rust proofing from my engine bay. I went online and read that oven cleaner works well so I bought Easy Off heavy duty oven cleaner from Walmart. It worked much better. It foams up when you spray it on and doesn't run. 5 minutes after spraying it on I just scrubbed the slime off with paper towels. The stuff is pretty strong. I've been using it on other stuff with success since. It's the best cleaner I have used so far.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 10:11 pm 
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Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2013 3:42 pm
Posts: 282
Location: Rochdale, MA
Yep heard that too. Easy off is used a lot in the plastic model building world for removing paint off of pastic car models without ruining the pastic below.

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Adam Perry
Datsun 260Z
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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:02 am 
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Location: CT
How much do you want for this car?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:32 am 
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Posts: 1373
Location: Webster, NY
An often overlooked but VERY common place that water gets to the floors of a 240Z is the airbox intake under the dash. The box is sealed to the air plenum under the cowl (where the wiper mechanism is) at the base of the windshield. The seal (glue) wears out and cracks over time, water goes into the cowl and makes it's way down the inner firewall and onto the floors.

TRUE.

Pull the blower mechanism completely out and reseal the plenum. Much easier to do if the dash is out, but not essential.

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1970 240Z
1977 530Z
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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:29 pm 
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Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2012 6:48 pm
Posts: 387
Location: Stamford, CT
Before:
Image
After a mineral spirits soak (too broke to try easy off!), some wire brushin, and a wipe down:

Image
Image
Image
Short video of what I did today(ignore the poor techniques! Became way more efficient as the work went on): http://www.youtube.com/watch?edit=vd&v=_g8siwL6WBc

Tomorrow Ill probably get to wire wheeling/brushing the rust away and might even get to put down the rustmort. Cut some of the jute because I wasnt sure if I was seeing rust or glue (still not very sure but the wire brushing should get rid of it).

ZCARNUT wrote:
Pull the blower mechanism completely out and reseal the plenum. Much easier to do if the dash is out, but not essential.

:cry: Never pulled the dash before but it seems like a huge hassle. Might save that for the last rust spot to fix and might as well try and get the blower going too.

Frank, I have no idea how much it will go for but it does have a number of things going for it. I was thinking that I might put it on ebay with a high reserve just to see what it would go for. I saw a car that looked nearly identical to my car in CA with an asking price of $1800. Of course that was a quick glance on craigslist and I have no idea what state the car is in but I think ill end up getting a car shipped from out of state if I cant find anything around here. Ideally id like to get an early 260Z and either use the money for a winter beater or use it on the car (public transportation is available). I paid $4500 for it and put in about $750-800 in it (had to put new tires on it) but im not sure ill be able to get all that back. Might as well list the things going for it since Ill have to do it soon anyway:

1971 Datsun 240Z
-VIN: HLS30-40666. A Devil Z! Fans of Wangan Midnight are all drooling now.
-53k miles on it. No telling if thats true but it was sitting in pieces for a few years and has been in the NE all its life. Previous owner registered in 2012. First time it had been registered since 1987.
-Daily driver
-Low rust for a NE car which supports the mileage claim
-Performance camshaft
-Unknown head work done.
-5 speed(not sure from which ZX. Big jump between 2nd and 3rd) and a LSD(not sure from what car either)
- Last time I tested with the SUs the car did 0-60 in 7 seconds. Did 0-60 in a little less than 7 with a passenger and a failing distributor when the Holley was installed(always used 93 octane. No wonder im broke!)
22mpg averaging 80mph with both windows down/16mpg driving like an idiot around town
-Beefier front and rear sway bars, header+twice pipes, pertronix+MSD blaster 2, dealer option AC installed (doesnt work. no compressor or power), new starter+fuel pump+55 amp alternator, "new suspension+brakes+bushings+wheel bearings" according to the previous owner.
-Most importantly the clock works. :lol:

Here it is as it looks today. Would you believe that ~3 people a week ask me if its for sale at red lights?:
Image

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:42 pm 
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Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2008 5:53 pm
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Location: CT
You don't have Twice Pipes. You have real ANSAs with CherryBomb Glasspacks. Twice Pipes are MSA's near-copy of the original ANSAs.

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