[Claytopia]

So by this stage all the electrics have been stripped out of the car, all of the panels have been pulled off, the motor and gear box are out and I have pulled out the interior, so it’s a basic rolling shell and this is where I made the single most stupid decision of the restoration so far (apart from being dumb enough to start one that is) but I’ll get to that in a moment.

I spoke to a mate who organises the local car show about the panel and paint shops in town and he gave me 3 recommendations (don’t forget this was before those confusing out of order posts) So I spoke to a few other people in town about the different shops and I had a look at some of their work and made my mind up about who I was going to use. (Yeah right)

So while speaking to him about the job I asked what I could do to keep the costs down and he said without hesitation to strip the tar out of the interior and the underneath. So I got a few different quotes to get the car media blasted. To get the job done properly would mean shipping the car down to Perth and a price tag of around 3k.

3k I thought to myself… that’s a bit of money, I could strip the tar of the car and spend that coin on a stroker kit or a set of alloy heads or my rear end etc. etc. Bugger it, it can’t be that hard I will strip the tar off myself… And there you have it my dumbest idea to date. Yep that’s right I was dumb enough to manually strip all the tar.

Now the tar in the interior was up to 8mm thick in some places so armed with a hot air gun and a collection of scrapers I put on some disposable overalls and got into it. Just from the interior I removed at least three 20l buckets of the stuff but when it came to doing the underneath and boot area the tar is nowhere near as thick and couldn’t be scrapped off so for the boot and underneath it was the hot air gun (my second by now) and a cheap low speed driver drill fitted with brass brushes.

Doing the boot wasn’t too bad, I put the car up on blocks and just sat on a chair in the void where the fuel tank had been and got to it. When it came time to do the underneath ,I bolted the car to the rotisserie dropped the front and rear ends out of the car spun it up on its side and got to work. By this stage I had had a lot of practice and the tar just about flew off.

So after 6 months toiling, 2 hot air guns, two low speed drills, just about every size scraper that exists; including a few I ground into custom shapes and countless wire brushes, the tar was no more!