The surface of your car should be clean before you start detailing. Obviously, you want to wash the car and get the major dirt and road debris off the car. The next step is to get the dirt and contaminants that are bonded into the clear coat off the surface. So, the first thing you should do to this panel after an initial wash is using a clay bar over the paint. What that’s going to do is pull out all the contaminants that are in the paint so that when we buff the entire panel we’re buffing the paint and not just pushing the contaminants around.
Tag: tech tips
How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.
No one’s perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you’re a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won’t end well!
How To Retrofit Modern Gauges in Your Classic
A retro looking dash for a 60’s Chevy truck will cost you about $400+, that’s a lot to spend on just the dash. Depending on your gauge layout there is another affordable option that will not only retain a classic original look, it will also allow the use of modern gauges. In this article I’ll show you how to retrofit modern gauges into an original cluster by only making a few minor modifications to the factory hardware.
Selecting the Right Air Compressor
An air compressors is a tool, specifically it is a tool to run other tools, unless you just need a volume of air compressed for a SCUBA tank or to inflate a tire. What sort and how big of a compressor you need is going to depend a lot on what sort of tools you need to run with it. A body shop running DA sanders and a paint booth all day long needs a much more robust compressor than an engine shop running impact guns and occasionally a media blast booth.
Sheet Metal Tools
A plasma cutter is a life saver for irregular shapes or thicker metal. Sure they are much more expensive than mechanical cutting tools, but for really complicated shapes and cut-outs nothing is faster and easier than a plasma cutter.
C-10 / C-20 Trailing Arm, Coil Spring Perch Rebuild
The rusty trailing arms on my 1963 C-20 were about as bad as they come, so much so I could reach my hand through some of the rust holes. About a year ago I stenciled out 3/16″ plate and welded them on both sides of the arms in order to regain structural rigidity so I could drive it safely. As you’ll see in later pictures I have yet to weld in one of the plates but it is already cut and will be welded in soon.
Plasma Cutter Consumables: What You’ll Need
Plasma cutters cut so easily they seem like magic; even their name sound like something from a science fiction story. But they are real, and in the past 15 years the prices have come down to the point that nearly every shop has one, from the hard working professionals to […]
Adding Custom Effects to Powder Coat
Just like paint, you can create custom powder coating finishes by adding metal flakes directly into the powder . Unlike paint powders will not accept pearl additives because pearls cannot withstand the high temperatures that powder requires to cure. With that said, creating custom powders is a game of trial […]
Defining Tungsten for TIG Welding
One of the defining elements of TIG welding is the Tungsten. In fact that is what the first letter in TIG stands for: Tungsten Inert Gas. TIG uses an inert gas to shield the weld (typically Argon), a filler rod of a metal that matches what you are welding, and an electrode made of Tungsten that focuses and directs the arc. All TIG electrodes are more than 95% Tungsten, which is a rare metal used because it is hard and has one of the highest melting points of any metal. There are at least 5 distinct types of “Tungstens”, as most people call them, typically color coated based on how much of what other elements have been added.