I got my windshield wiper cover removed and the mechanism out - I now know you can just remove it all as one piece lol the passenger side arm is broken, any tips where to get a replacement?




After work today I drove to Lafayette to get the windshield frame and lower corners from a guy that parts out C3's. Solid metal that hasn't been bitten by the tin termites! I think it was a good deal at $200 for it all!




I started a thread to discuss the windshield frame repair and someone made a REALLY good point: I need to have my body properly supported on the frame before I start cutting on the birdcage. I swear this was an obvious thing that hit me like a lightning bolt! lol Since my body isn't evenly and properly supported on the mounts, I'm going to wait until I put it back on the frame in primer to do the windshield frame repair. Also have a unamamious agreement to just cut the fender corners to repair the loer frame.

https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums...post1607177066

 

Check with Corvette Central for the wiper arms.
Also check the the Vette Collector.
Matt is the owner, he has a warehouse of new, used and nos parts.

 

Since I decided to wait until my body is back on the frame to cut up the windshield, I had to pivot my plants and order of operations:

1. Prep engine bay for paint and paint engine bay
2. re-seal oil pan on engine so body can go on frame
3. Strip paint of body, body work, and primer before body goes back on frame.

Today I finished degreasing, cleaning, and stripping everything off the cowl and the engine bay. I once again used scotch pads with simple green, and a bucket of soapy water. I got a LOT of grime off the car! once I finished this and it dried, I then wiped it all don with acetone before I sanded anything.

When I removed the heat shields and degreased the cowl, I found some factory grease pen marks on it (not sure what it means):




With everything clean and all parts removed, I was finally able to start sanding down the cowl. I used 80 grit and getting to all the little nooks and cranny is a pain, but made some serious progress today. Going to finish it tomorrow and the plan is to hit it with several coats of Kirker DTM Epoxy primer, then sand it all down to make it smooth and pretty before I top coat it all satin black.

 

Amazing work.
I wish I had room in my garage.
I would have saved a ton of money doing a lot of this myself

 

My best friend stopped by tonight , and was willing to do some wrenching. I asked him if he wanted to help me pop the engine back out and reseal the oil pan: "hell yeah brother!"

With his help we made quick work of popping the engine back out the chassis



Here you can see the leak on the front seal, and I also had one on the rear seal!



I did run the engine through a full 5 min run/heat cycle in order to break it in, so i could get all the "glitter" out the oil pan when I dropped it. There was plenty to go around! lol No more than i usually see when I do a break in and nothing I saw that raised a red flag



Got out the brake clean and cleaned the whole pan out of the break in dust!



After that I put oil pan studs in the block, then black RTV on the pan, followed by the clean one piece gasket, then RTV on top of the gasket: ready to go back home!



Now my oil pan is resealed , I hopefully remediated the little oil leaks that I saw when I broke in the engine. We'll run it again to confirm, then hopefully she'll be ready to be reunited with the body later this month.

 

Nice work.
I love how Amazon gets so much free advertising as we all use and reuse the boxes after we receive them.

 

Thats a lot of glitter for "normal". What does your filter look like?

 

Thanks! Yeah amazon boxes are a weekly chore to haul to the dumpster at my house lol

 

I haven't opened up the filter yet, but this is similar to what i've seen in the past. My engine building buddy with me said it looked normal. How do your rebuilds normally look? should I do further inspection? The picture does look worst than it did in person.

 

Cut open the oil filter: besides a little glitter in the can, no chunks or red flags in the filter - i'm good with it. I did realize that the pic of the oil pan was full of brake cleaner, which changed the color and made it look worse.

 

THe oil filter looked like mine. If the pic made the pan look worse that it actually was, that makes sense

 

Hope all is good, you certainly have me thinking about what happened to your engine!!

 

Bad bearing, Clevite, it just fell apart, the shell didnt spin, there was no evidence it welded it self together. I all happened all at once too. Dont know what happened to the 396 yet. After I get the 427 back together and installed I will pull the 396 apart, but I think I used clevites in that too

 

That's so frustrating that Clevite is putting crap like that out!

 

Today was sunshine and 75, and I wanted to get get in the shop so I could start stripping some paint. I wanted to try out the razor blade method again and do some experimentation.

First thing was to wash the car down to degrease and get rid of containments. I got a bucket of water with dish soap and washed it down, dried it, then wiped the whole car down with acetone.



I could now get busy with my heat gun and razor blade: went horrible! Last time the paint came right off , this time the blade kept digging in and gauging the freaking car! I kept trying different methods, but just couldn't get good results. I stopped, since I was created new body work for me to do




I then decided to break out my DA to clean the area up and see how it handled the paint. The DA made quick work of the paint, and exposed my hack job:



Here's a close up of the mess I created


I carefully ran the DA on the top of the fender - which I was scare to get aggressive due to the complicated lines of the C3.



I had some standard EPA weak paint stripper that I wanted to experiment with, and since the paint was sanded on top I figured i'd give it go. It did strip some paint, it was slow and weak though. The more sanded off, the better it worked...



So here's where I sit: One hack job of razor blade removal on one front fender that I cleaned up with the DA



And the top of that fender has part of one coat stripped off from the crappy stripper......





I'd say the results from it all are quite disappointing! Not sure where I went wrong on the razors and why it seemed to work previously? The off the shelf stripper I have would day forever to work - maybe I should try the "Cooper's Strip Club"? Or just go with the DA and hand block the whole freaking thing? Y'all give me a reality check here and some guidance I'm going to take the wife for some queso and margaritas and ponder my next steps

 

I think you need to use a heat gun with the razor blade method. As for the paint stripper I saw a video of someone using it on here and it seemed to do a good job, cant remember the name if it though

 

My painter hand sands every car that goes through his shop.
He said it’s hours of work, but he won’t do them any other way.
Have fun!

 

Heat gun and razor blade didn't work well at all. I did find plastic razor blades on amazon and ordered some to try it out with them because they shouldn't gauge the body.

 

Sounds like you have a good painter! I ordered some 40 and 60 grit for my Dura blocks - hand sanding is slow, but the results are worth the time!

 

He told me he spends more time repairing the damage people do stripping their own cars to save a little money.
In the long run it ends up costing most of them more than it would if he hand sanded it.