1931 Ford Restoration Diary

I’m just about finished sanding the coat of filler-surfacer that I had put on the body last fall. I touched up a few more tiny dings and scratches that had evaded detection until now.
In a couple of days I should be able to start masking the body. That will be complicated, since I have to keep paint away from the engine, interior, underside, drivetrain, wheels, etc. Once it is all masked I will spray on one last coat of filler-surfacer and wet-sand everything. Then it will be ready for the finish coats.

The body will take longer than I expected to get ready for painting. I had given it a first coat of primer last fall, and over last weekend I block-sanded most of the open areas. That revealed a bunch of high and low spots that will need an additional coat of primer. I also discovered a couple of small dents that I hadn’t noticed in three years of working on the body, which needed a bit of feather-fill to fix them up. Also, there are lots and lots of moldings and other oddly-shaped areas that will need careful, tedious sanding. Ironically, the areas that I had done a bunch of metalworking on (like part of the roof) were OK. It was the areas that I had assumed were fine which had subtle irregularities.

Hopefully by the end of the month I will have all the sanding done, and the body ready to paint.

I also repaired a broken mounting stud on the stainless steel trim strip that goes just behind the hood.

Over the last week I finished painting the passenger-side doors.  It went more quickly and easily than the first two.

Now I need to have a look at the rest of the body and figure out what to do next.  It got its first coat of primer-surfacer last September, and I did a little bit of sanding last fall.  It will need a lot more sanding, and probably some more primer in some places.  Hopefully I can finish all of that by the end of June.

During the last week or two, I started working on the two passenger-side doors.  There were a couple of low spots on them, a bit too low to be taken care of by the primer-surfacer, so I put a thin layer of feather-fill on those areas.  Then I applied a thick coat of primer-surfacer, and started block-sanding the main flat areas of the doors.  I cut all the way through the primer-surfacer in a few places, so I put one one more coat.  After that, I was able to finish the block-sanding.  I still need to wet-sand all the moldings and reveals on the upper portion of the doors.  After that, I need to do the same exact things I did to the first two doors: spray a sealer coat of epoxy primer, paint the edges with semi-gloss maroon, paint the outer surfaces with maroon, apply a bunch of masking tape, and paint the trim areas with black.

I sprayed on the black trim coat, which took more paint than I expected.  It was chilly, so I left the doors in the sun for a day to dry well.  Then I mounted them back on the car, and removed the other set to start working on them.

The two doors I am working on needed one final coat of primer-surfacer. Once I took care of that, I was able to wet-sand them. That took a while, because of all the moldings, nooks and crannies, etc. Now that the doors were ready to paint, I did some improvements to the plastic painting tent in my garage. I added a back wall and a ventilation fan with a filter. Then a couple of days ago I sprayed the doors with a coat of epoxy primer to serve as a sealer. The following day I painted the edges with a maroon semi-gloss paint mix. Today, after the edges had dried, I masked them off and sprayed the outer surfaces with gloss maroon paint. Tomorrow, when that is dry, I will do more masking and spray the moldings and window frame with gloss black paint.

Once these doors are done, I will repeat the exact same process with the two passenger-side doors.

I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks (including vacation), so a huge amount of progress. But it got warm quicker than I expected, so it’s time to get back to painting.

I made a form to bend the roof molding and I bent it to the correct shape.  It came out OK, just a few wrinkles on the inner edge that nobody will ever see.  Just before the roof area gets its final coat of paint, I will nail it in place.

In the last week or so I block-sanded two doors, sprayed on another coat of primer-surfacer, and blocked them again. They will need one more coat of primer before getting their final wet-sanding.

In a few days the two doors should be ready for the finish painting. The masking and finish painting will be sort of complicated, because there will be three colors: Semi-gloss maroon for the edges, gloss maroon for the main part of the door and the window reveal, and gloss black for the upper part.

I’ve still been pretty busy, with not much free time. I was able to do another application of epoxy to the steering wheel. I’ve gotten better at it, and probably after one or two more applications I’ll be done.

The next thing I plan to do is bending the moldings that go around the edge of the fabric roof insert.  The weather is getting warmer, so after that, I can probably resume getting the body and doors ready for painting.

We had nice weather last weekend, so I actually took the car out on the road, driving around a nearby residential cul-de-sac. It ran (and stopped) OK, but the lack of a windshield make it harder to go faster than about 30 MPH.

Lots of work and travel the last 2-3 weeks. About all I did was some more work on filling the cracks in the steering wheel. It’s a rather tedious and messy job, since the epoxy paste is so sticky. It also takes a long time to dry, over 24 hours, which makes the job even slower.

I got the front seat all finished. It looks quite nice. I installed it so I could have the pleasure of sitting in the car and actually driving up and down the driveway. When the weather gets warmer and I am ready to resume painting, I’ll have to remove it again.

I also started work on the back seat. I got the backrest out of the attic, removed the crumbling, mouldering original fabric (the only remaining original material on any of the seats), separated the frame and springs, and cleaned them off. The wooden frame is in perfect shape, and can be re-used as-is. However, the springs got rather rusted on one corner, and I will have to reinforce one section of particularly rusty wire.

I was given a 50’s GM fuel filter, the kind with a little glass bowl to hold the filter element. I hooked it up to gas tank fuel valve, and made a proper metal fuel line to go to the carb. It is not “correct”, but it does have a period look, and looks much nicer than the rubber hose and modern plastic filter I had been using.