The first step to any restoration project and one of the most important to do right! Spending time to do this stage correctly can make a huge difference in the quality of the overall finished product. This stage also uncovers any hidden rust or sub standard previous repairs. Once this stage is completed we can provide a better indication of how long the repairs will take and a more accurate price estimate can be provided.

Vehicle strip down

We remove all mechanical parts, wiring, suspension, glass and bolt on panels from the vehicle. Also all interior and internal hardware in the bolt on panels are removed. Every item is photographed, removed, bagged & tagged and its condition recorded before placed into storage containers. Doing this ensures each part is kept safe and can be refurbished if needed and re-fitted back to the car properly during re-assembly stage. 

This stage is sometimes done by the client/owner of the vehicle to save labour time and we are happy to help our clients with advice to do this. The only time we recommend us doing this stage is if we will be also completing the Re-assembly.

Preparing Body & Panels for media blasting

This is the foundation stage to any quality restoration. Panel joins & seams are common areas for rust/corrosion to start. To make sure we can get to all these areas, we remove all seam sealers, sound deadeners and stone guard coatings. We also ‘sweat’ out the factory lead joins as they are another common area for rust. If the job requires it, we also carefully unpick any exterior panels (roof skins, 1/4 panels ect) so we can access the inner panels with the media blaster. This ensures we remove as much of the corrosion as possible and it leaves us with nice clean metal to apply our Epoxy primer to.

All exterior panels are not media blasted. We prefer to manually strip them to bare metal to avoid any warping damage from media blasting. Doing this ensures we have the best base to complete any necessary rust/metal finishing repairs.

Metal treatment/prep & Epoxy coating

Once we receive the body & panels back from media blasting, we prepare them for Epoxy primer as soon as possible. All exterior body & panels are sanded, metal treated, sanded again then thoroughly cleaned before we apply Glasurit Epoxy primer to all bare metal. This is a high quality product that seals the metal and also contains rust inhibiting properties to ensure the base metal is protected and kept in good condition for many years to come.