I've been stripping the paint off the tunnel, the NAPA stripper really works well. I was surprised at the amount of corrosion under the paint. I'm going to have to do some soda blasting and rubbing with a Scotch Brite pad to get this thing ready for paint. That is the big hill I need to get over...If I can get this thing painted before it turns cold, I have a chance of getting it done this year.
I decided to sandblast the "power module" the other night. This is the sub-frame that the ski spindles go in and the engine bolts to. On '72s this unit is steel. I pulled out the blaster, a TIP pressure unit I bought back in the early '80s.
I hadn't used it in a couple of years, and I quickly found that some sand in the mixer valve had turned hard, and was preventing any flow out of the tank. I cleaned that out, but it didn't help much. I decided to drain the sand out of the tank and start over, and when I did I quickly found the new issue, I had a mouse nest in the tank! I drained the sand, blew out the chewed up cardboard, then found I had a crispy critter still in the tank. I poked that out the bottom with a stick, re-assembled the plumbing , re-filled the tank, and things went a whole lot better.
I rattle canned some zinc primer on the steel to keep it from rusting.
