1965 Fiat 500F - Summer Pottering

Great to see this car being saved.

Very cool...

I’ve been getting the black stuff off the bottom of my car too that has also been covered over with stonechip . I’ve used the wire wheel on the grinder. It gets it off ok but the mess is horrendous. And like you say it’s appears to have not done much for rust protection.

Long forward to more updates.

When it’s old and hard like this was, starting with a nice sharp wood chisel was definitely the way. Scraps the bulk of it with relative ease, especially on big flat areas. Then yes, some form of solvent to get the remains off.

The engine bay is a slightly different material, it’s original Fiat stuff. As it’s so old it’s drier. It scraped with the wood chisel ok though, so will do that and then go to knotted wire wheel I think.

On with the scraping! I found that the underseal in the engine bay was so old that it had dried out to the point where I could attack it with an angle grinder with a knotted wire wheel on it, and instead of melting it just turned to dust. A rather large amount of unpleasant black dust though, which seemed to just stick to everything, especially me as It was a warm day! Anyway, it was done and so I could get a bit of primer on it and feel better about the world.



Seam sealer was the next task. I tried a different brand of seam sealer, as it came in a nice tube and would go in my calking gun, making hopefully a neater job than the usual brush on type. Sadly though, it reacted badly with the primer I'd used and cracked. So I had to dig that out and went back to the old trusty Upol seam sealer I've been using for a decade. With that dried out nicely I could mask up and prepare to get the spray gun out.



On top of the primer, I went with a rubberised stone chip, which went on fairly well. It should give me a decent level of protection in those hard wearing areas.




And now it was ready for some paint! In most of my previous builds I'd gone for black underside. I like the look when its all fresh and shiny, but the downside is that very quickly, once it's been driving out in the real world, the black seems to just look like an old car, and can give off that 'slathered in underseal 'bodge job vibe. So for this car, I decided I would go with body colour for once.



I mean its such a dark blue it'll probably just end up looking black under there anyway! haha. I do like the colour though, and I think this mix I've had made up might even look a touch more grey than what was previously on the car, which I like. It's even more understated and is a wonderfully elegant colour.

I'm pleased with how the paint went on, it feels like a fairly easy colour to work with. It always makes such a difference to see things painted.

At one stage I was considering stopping the body work here for a while and focusing on getting a rolling chassis together, but having thought more about it, I'm going to push on and try to finish out the body shell before the warmth of summer leaves us. I don't know if I'll manage it, but it's gotta be worth a shot! I don't want to risk micro blistering from damp under the paint, like I've had issues with on the Daimler, so if its not ready to paint before autumn starts to really bite I'll have to wrap it up and wait till spring to paint it I think.

With no clean running gear I repurposed the box tubing I'd bought to brace the shell into some stands so that I wouldn't damage the fresh underside when I roll the car the right way up.



I think a couple more cross braces would be wise, so I'll sort that I the next few days. Then it's time to get the car rolled the right way up and time to break out the sandpaper I think!

100% sort the paint this summer, good job so far 👍

If the prep's done you can jump on it when the opportunity arises i guess. I can imagine the fun of that roof: i assume no headlining in these?

2 months since the last update, I've no idea where the time went! As usual I've been chipping away at the project, but maybe not making the leaps and bounds forward that I'd like to, haha.

The enthusiasm to push on with the bodywork drained away fairly quickly as the weather started to drawn in and I realised just how many hours of paint prep were ahead of me. I've made some progress on that front though, and the left hand side of the car is mostly roughed out. Still a fair way to go on this though.



In the mean time I've retreated inside the shed and started with some of the mechanicals. Starting at the front made sense, so I rounded up all the front bits to have a look at what I had to work with.



Mmmm yeah, its all a bit rough! I worked my way through dismantling it, while making a shopping list. Corrosion seems to be a bigger issue than wear, for example the ball joints for the track rods were fine, they just needed new boots to replace the perished originals, but the threaded section to allow you to adjust the length was just rusted solid, to the point that I bent one of the arms trying to free it off.



Oh well, at least the parts are available and not overly expensive! Good job it's not too pricey as there was a rather large list of things to buy, including a new RHD steering idler as mine was seized solid and then the main casting proceeded to snap when I attempted to press the old bushes out.



Quite the haul of parts there, including all new dampers, full brake system inc drums, wheel bearings, all suspension bushes, new rear suspension arms and the list goes on...

So where to start... the from uprights and kingpins made sense as I know these can be a bit tricky.



I could feel very little play in mine by hand, but I know when they are packed with old grease it can be misleading just trying to move them by hand. A full strip down and potentially rebuild was the only thing that made sense.

I have a cheapo table top blasting cabinet and so the front uprights, steering arms, brake backing plates and various other small components all got treated to some compressed air and iron grit. The budget nature of the tools shows, but it got the job done eventually and got underseal and rust out from corners I'd have never managed with a wire wheel.

I treated all the bare parts to some anti-corrosion primer and then a splash of paint to brighten things up. I went for a light gold / champagne kind of colour, as I thought this would contrast nicely with the dark blue body without being too stand out. Hopefully no-one but me really gets to see the underside on a regular basis anyway, but I'll know its there and feel better about it rather than it all just being a bit rusty / flat black!





The first king pin assembly went back together nicely, and with a new pin and a carefully fitted spacer there was no play. The second one was more of a fighter! The pin that came out of it was heavily corroded (on the right of the picture obviously!)



And the new pin would not go in, so I think someone had either fitted new bronze bushes and reamed them to fit the old worn pin, or possibly not reamed them at all. The bushes themselves were badly scored and the top one was loose and half slid out when I removed the pin.

I was able to draw a new bush in using some threaded bar, nuts and various washers .



And eBay supplied me with the longest 19/32" hand reamer I could find (long so both bushes can be reamed in-line with each other at the same time). It still wasn't quite long enough, as the reamer doesn't get to its full size till about 1/2 the way down it's length. I went as far as I could from the one direction before swapping over and coming at it from the other.



This was obviously close enough as the new pin is now a good fit and I was able to assemble this side also. Both uprights got new bushes at the top also, where the upper suspension arm mounts.



The front spring also got stripped down, cleaned, painted and reassembled, and you can see a few other bits that have been blasted and painted in the mean time also.




I'm just waiting on some bolts and washers in there post but then hopefully the front brakes and hubs should all go together fairly quick, especially as most of it is new!

Thank you. Yes, I like this bit too.

After the months / years of bodywork it’s a refreshing change to do some actual mechanics.

There are quite a few around with bike engines fitted probably the cheapest way to decent amounts of reasonably reliable power.