As we mentioned before, we are almost ready to paint the buggy. We wanted to have it sandblasted before priming it though to get some of the welding slag and surface rust off the steel. Ultimately, we ended up having it media blasted today which is apparently very similar to sand blasting except with a different media. The media choices are sand, crushed-recycled glass, walnut shells, baking soda, crushed corn cobs, and various other types of ingredients with varying grits and hardness. We chose soda. No, not Coca-cola, but baking soda! It is environmentally friendly and because it is a finer grit, we were able to do some aluminum pieces as well. It can also be sprayed with a little water so it keeps dust to a minimum and keeps everything nice and cool. We found a local company that comes right out to the house and does all the dirty work. Don't worry, Elwood still supervised the event to make sure everyone did a good job. The next step now is to prime and paint the steel. We have a short window of time with which to do this before the good old Florida humidity starts to rust the steel again. Here are a few photos we took of the SodaBlasting today. A plug for Blast All, the company who did all the work. A little trivia the man told us, this type of cleaning was invented in 1972 for cleaning the Statue of Liberty. Apparently you can clean copper the same way!
The equipment...we don't mess around!
The buggy is ready. We removed the front end and wheels because we already painted it back when we took it off the donor car.
The "Supervisor"
About to be chased by the Soda Cloud
The before and after wheels. What a difference!
We aren't using these wheels on this buggy.
Hopefully we can use them when we build
Jen's "Barbie Beach Cruiser" someday which
will of course be all pink!
He was pleased with the work.
After about an hour and a half,
our leader was getting tired and bored.
"C'mon already!"
All clean and back in the garage...