Whole Lotta Strippin' Going On

The last two nights I worked on stripping more exterior parts off KITT. 

I started by removing the clips from the fuel and brake lines. I put them in little baggies and labeled them.

My next project was to take care of the crack I found in the firewall. Now that we painted the engine bay with POR-15 the crack is barely visible, but it still needs to be sealed and reinforced on the inside. I taped off the area around the crack with my Hello KITTy duct tape and then coated the area with POR-Strip.

I let it sit for about 15 minutes and then wire brushed the paint off. Notice the black marks on the top of the drive tunnel. That is where I dripped POR-Strip, and it ate through the POR-15. Boy, is Sara going to be impressed. 

In order to keep the crack from spreading any further, I drilled small holes at each end of the crack.

Holes drilled. This is what it looks like from the inside.

Now that the holes are drilled you can see where the crack is on the outside.

I worked on removing the driver side plastic fender well next.

This is the fender well out. The one end is cracked pretty badly so I will end up looking for a replacement piece at a salvage yard.

I removed both front mud flaps next. These will not be going back on KITT.

On to the hack job fog lights. This guy had to have used eight nuts each as spacers to stand these lights on. It looks quite ridiculous.

The driver side fog light hit the ground instead of swinging back and forth nicely by its wire like the passenger side fog light did. Guess the previous owner's exposed hand-twisted wiring did not hold. These fog lights are glass, not plastic, if you were wondering. I vacuumed up the glass shards after Sara took this picture.

I also removed the fender trim guards. As with the mud flaps, these will not be going back on KITT. This is a picture of everything I removed from the car tonight.

My next project will be wire brushing all of the excess dirt and grime off the engine bay portion of the underbody, basically the firewall forward.

It is just a fine dirt when brushed dry, but if it gets wet it is a nasty mess.