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1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 (Lilith)

Stripping the paint

Previously we cleaned up the obvious body work on the front and back of the car as well as the interior. Now we're going to strip the paint off the exterior of the body of the car.

This is why I prefer to do full frame off restorations rather than in-situ ones. I like sandblasting much more than using paint stripper. Here you can see the extent of the work from the first day. The rear quarter panel and half of the roof were cleaned off.
	The door has been removed to get full access to the body. It takes a while to clean out all the nooks and crannies
Here you can see the door that's been removed. All the door glass, window winding mechanisms, handles and locking assemblies have been removed. Doors are much lighter and easier to deal with once you've removed all the interior bits.
	Yet another day gone stripping the paint off the rest of the roof and started the upper half of the driver's side rear quarter panel.
More time spent finishing up the passenger side. You'll note that the windshield and rear window have also been removed from the Mustang. The lip in which these windows sit can be a source of a lot of rust damage. You need to carefully clean out these areas and check to make sure there's no serious rust.
	Here you can see that the driver's side is finally down to true bare metal. Once all the paint was finally removed the metal was treated with Fast Etch to protect against rusting.
And here we have one of those oh, damn! moments. After the paint was stripped it became readily obvious that the lower part of the panel was very patched in the past. In addition, there's stress fractures in the sheetmetal surrounding the turn signal cut out.
	So, after some investigation, the offending rusted pieces were cut away to prepare for replacement with a new panel piece.
The replacement panel has now been welded in. The patch anel di not come with the turn signal hole pre-cut so that had do be done as well. So, the exterior of the chassis has now been completely stripped and all rust repair necessary has been completed.

Step 6: Priming the Body

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