With the colder weather I’m limited to painting only small parts, the garage is heated but painting requires so much ventilation that the temperature drops below the paint minimum temperature. If the catalyzed automotive paints I’m using (epoxy, acrylic urethane) drop below their minimum temperature during the curing process, the molecular cross-linking stops and the paint is permanently in a gooey state. So since I’m limited to painting small parts for a while I needed a way to strip the paint and rust from all the various small parts. Sandblasting is a quick way to do this. However I had no way of recovering the blasting media, making blasting completely impractical, messy, and wasteful for small parts. To solve this problem I found a (deeply discounted) blasting cabinet that will enable blasting the small parts inside without using excessive amounts of blast media. After the performance today I wish I had gotten this a while ago because the results are much better than can be obtained by hand, infinitely faster, and with barely any effort required.
After many parts were blasted I finished the gauge restoration. The broken fuel gauge needle was replaced with a section of a “T” pin and painted to match the other two gauges. The sunburned celluloid indicator light lenses on the back of the speedometer were replaced with new lenses. Finally, everything was re-assembled including repainted light rings for all the gauges.
