Cleaning up the heat shields
Monday, July 13th, 2009Today I mounted the rear of the propshaft and tightened the nuts at 37 Nm. It’s a very tight fit for a 17 mm socket, but it went okay somehow. After that I took off the heat shields above the rear silencers (or are they resonators?) and cleaned them up. They had the usual zinc coating and body coating on the metal side, plus big areas of surface rust and the original black paint. After half an hour of angle grinder and wire brush treatment, they got a coat of black caliper paint. It was the only heat resistant paint I had handy, plus it’s gloss black. We’ll see how it looks after being heat cycled a few dozen times. The upper side of the shields have some sort of dusty, carboard-esque layer which maaaay be asbestos. I don’t know.
After that, I started on the front attachment points for the trailing arms. The body coating is more or less gone, and there’s some surface rust on the steel. I’m going to grind away the rust, paint it with Owatrol and apply a couple of layers of undercoating on them.
