Opening the centre section of the frame

 

 

 

As I said earlier, if you want to galvanise your car frame properly, you must remove 100% of the paint from it. Otherwise you are just wasting your time. Don't listen to rumours that paint will burn off in the galvanising process - you will not get a good galvanised finish in any areas where there is still paint, and the area will rust again.

 

That said, I had to figure out a way to remove all the paint from the center tunnel of my DeLorean frame. I now had it removed from the front and back internal sections, so this was the only section remaining with lots of epoxy.

 

I decided to cut the plate out at the back of the fuel tank section, to gain access to the inside of this area. I used a 1mm stainless steel cutting disc on an angle grinder to make as precise a cut as possible, so that I could later weld back in the original plate of metal.

 

The pictures below show the steps in removing this plate, along with the results of removing some of the epoxy inside with the heat gun, by heating it from the outside. You can also see in the first few pictures that I am making good progress removing the epoxy from the outside of the frame!

 

The last 2 pictures show how I also cut open the boxed in section by the rear upper control arm attachment point, to remove the epoxy in this area. I saved the plates I cut out so that they could be welded back in later...