Today I finished scraping the undercoating off the underside of the body. Last weekend I completed the front section of the underside. This week I tried to spend one hour each night doing some scraping, and today I polished off the rear of the car. This is tedious work, though not that physically demanding.
Mid-week my heat-gun from
Harborfreight ($19) broke down, so I exchanged it for a new one under their 90-day waranty. In general I try to buy high quality power tools, but if I can save some money on a tool I'll use on a very limited basis I will buy from Harborfreight.
During last week I tried to spend one hour per evening after work scraping away at the undercoating. This enabled me to break-up the tedium into more tolerable increments. I made decent progress, completing the area directly beneath the rear shelf over a three-day period, as well as one of the rear wheel wells.
This morning I removed the undercoating from under the passenger side rear wheel well. This area was pretty tricky to do because it is difficult to reach and also has a nearly continuous curve that makes scraping with a flat-edged scraper difficult. I started on the front lower edge.
I applied heat by holding my heat gun, set on high, about two inches from the surface for ten seconds. That softened the tar enough that I could scrape down to the metal.
I worked my way up the front edge and around the apex of the wheel well towards the rear.
After removing the undercoating the seam in the middle of the wheel well was visible.
That left the remaining area under the trunk to be scraped.
On the underside of the trunk I began on the left side and worked my way across.
I also scraped the tar off the underside of the rear fenders.
Here is the completed trunk area.
This completed the undercoating removal. It was a long job that would test anyone's patience, but necessary to reveal the condition of the underlying sheet metal. Here is a shot of the exposed underbelly of the body and the pile of tar chips I removed.
