Having A Blast!

What's going down in the hood?
Old nasty burnt up paint, that's what!

 Our original hood was bent up beyond repair. So I contacted Pat, the Jeep guy in Long Beach, and he had a hood off of a Jeep that had caught fire. The metal was pretty much straight, but the multiple layers of paint were scorched and cracking. The whole thing needed to be completely stripped and fresh primer laid down before we could paint it. If not, the new paint would eventually crack and flake off. A lot of work,  but for $75, how could I pass it up?

We started with Kassie and I removing the hinge bolts and then lifting and carrying the hood to our home-made sand blasting booth.

Once we got the hood off, we found a nice little surprise.. RUST! Under the hinges, where the original owner of the hood had forgot to primer after the paint burnt off, was rusty.

Here you can clearly see the cracked paint we had to strip completely off.

I borrowed the portable sand blaster from my work, bought some play sand, and was ready to blast away at the old paint.... silly me.The sand I had bought was Play Sand and much too "wet" to use in a sand blaster. It was late, so I decided to go back to Home Depot in the morning to get "dry" sand.

Saturday, I made it to Home Depot, got 100lbs of med grit construction sand, filled the sand blaster, fired up my compressor and we were off to the races!

It wasn't as easy as you would think.

 

Left: Here's a picture of the rust that had formed under the hood hinge on the replacement hood.

Kassie and I took turns blasting away at the paint. On a 90 degree day, with mask and goggles, it was hot, sweaty, sandy, dirty work. Eventually, we got all the paint of the top and underside of the hood.

 <= Me!
(my best side)

Kassie =>

After all is said and done, we probably spent enough on sand and primer to have paid for a body shop to do the same thing. But where's the fun in that? Here's the Before and After Pics:

The Finished Product!

 Straight, Clean, and ready to paint. Mounted it back onto Alice. Looks great IMO!

More to come.....

 Where the Rubber
                Meets the Road

Finally got my act together enough to find a used set of Jeep Ravine Rims (Thanks to a nice CHP officer I met through www.JeepForum.com) and set about finding the best possible value on tires.

The local 4x4 Shops have awesome tires, but they are really designed and priced for a real off-roading enthusiast. Looked at used tires, but this Jeep is for my daughter, so used was eliminated as an option very quickly. I found a great deal on a set of Goodyear Wrangler Radial All Terrain tires at my local Wal Mart. An hour or so later, and Alice was back on the road.

Still need to work on the body to get Alice ready for paint, but I did order a Monstaliner kit from Magnet Paints. As soon as the kit comes in, we are seting out to Monstaliner the interior floor surfaces.

I'll post a blog with pics after we complete the Monsta install.

Thanks for reading!