Well, I've been working on the SX/4 for over a couple of months and It seems like I haven't accomplished much. There's been 3 or 4 times the normal amount of rainfall this spring and I tend to not work when its raining so that's part of it but I'm still surprised I'm not further along. I had hoped to have the car ready for paint at the end of last month but I'm still a ways away from that yet. Its been a lot of filling and sanding so I thought I'd post a few pictures of the sort of work I've been doing recently.
The driver's door although it has no rust has needed quite a bit of work. The window frame had what appeared to be a minor bend in it and my husband and I spent a lot of time straightening it out but the gap between the right side of the window frame at the top of the door frame is about 1/2" larger than the gap between the lower right side of the window frame and the door frame even though the door is properly aligned so more work is needed. The door had a lot of dings in it so I decided it was easier to remove all the paint, body fill the entire door and sand down the entire area:
The body fill on the door has been sanded to 80 grit and the door primed so any bare metal doesn't rust until I get back to the finer sanding:
I'm now working on prepping the engine compartment for paint, here's how it looked before I started:
Here's how it looked after I removed the stuff that's coming off for paint, cleaned the grease and dirt off of it, sandblasted the rusty areas and spot primed to prevent rust until I get the finish sanding done:
There was a fair bit of rusty surfaces in the engine compartment and I was prepared to find holes after the sandblasting but the panels all turned out to be solid despite the rust.