Next up in "Adrian's adventures in car repair" we pull the back-end of the GTO off for fun and profit :)
Firstly, to make things easier, I used my wooden ramps to raise the car up a bit, then jacked it up on to axle stands. This meant I could work on all the random bolts holding the bumper on far easier.
I didn't get a good photo of the full dismantle process, but suffice to say the bumper alone requires the removal of over 30 bolts. Not including all the light clusters and internal plastics that had to be removed first. Many of the bumper bolts were seized, and 7 of them decided they really didn't want to come off at all and snapped. This did not make me a happy bunny. Still, a pair of mole-grips and plenty of WD-40 and all of the bolts were removed one way or another.
Once the bumper was off we could get a clear look at the crash bar. It isn't in fantastic cosmetic condition but the rust only appears to be on the surface.
Note in the first and second pics there is a slight indentation in the middle of both the number plate holder and the crash bar. It would seem the car has had a rearwards contact with a pole or tree at some point. ( This seems to be a common theme with these cars ¬_¬ ) The prang doesn't appear to have been very major though as the dent is fairly shallow, but it was probably enough to require a new bumper. You cant really tell though so it probably happened in Japan some time in the 90s before it was imported.
Ultimately the crash bar, and the number plate mounting bracket will need something to stop the rust, and pretty it up a bit, so that's something else to add to the list.
Round the corner we have the fuel filler pipe, and below it is a heat shield to stop the hot exhaust from causing a fire. In the first picture you can see it looks reasonable intact, albeit rusty as hell. I prodded it to make sure. Mistake. It fell apart in my hands. It looks like it was filled with some gravelly dirt / something. I am not sure if this was some kind of insulating foam / cement or just crap scooped up off the road over the years. Either way it all fell off in a pile of rusty metal. That will need fixing before I can drive it any significant distance.
One more thing I spotted while I was under the back of the car. The GTO has 2 rear tow hooks. Like the bumper they are covered in rust, but also like the bumper they are pretty heavy duty metal so the rust is only cosmetic. As I am here I might as well treat them and respray. Easier said than done.
These hooks are held on with large 14mm bolts. Large bolts = large rusting area for the bolts to seize with. On the plus side this meant a low chance of sheering the bolts in half. On the down side it meant they weren't going anywhere.
I sprayed them all (6 in total) with a butt-load of penetrating oil, but they didn't want to shift, so after about 48hrs of intermittent spraying and trying to undo them I resorted to heat. Out with the blowtorch. Again, easier said than done.
The hooks are mounted to the chassis right next to the fuel tank. Blowtorch + 60 litres of high octane fuel = bad times. Luckily i could aim the heat in the opposite direction and everything was fine. After a few minutes of flame on each bolt they all came loose.
Unfortunately I didn't manage to get rid of some of the lumpiness as the angle grinder is too big to get into the nooks, but they still came up ok.
They will get re-fitted to the car later when I can source some replacement bolts as they original ones were pretty knackered after i removed them. Luckily I don't often need to tow anything.
Moving forward a bit, with the car up in the air I can get a better look at the sills. The front and back are pretty rotten and will need cutting out, but the center section looks fine. MitsiArt have said it will probable cost a few hundred to sort, but its not critical at the moment. It will also be worth scrubbing off the undercoat and re-coating to fix any gaps in the coverage that are the source of much of the rust.
Back to the rear end of the car I pulled off the crash bar to get a better look at it. The rust (like the rest of the car) is far more prevalent than I would have preferred. Upon tipping up the bar, a pile of rust fell out of it, some of the flakes are fairly significant. I can see this is going to be a regular feature on this blog. Oh well. Some discussions with various Mitsubishi people suggest that its probably worth it. At least its a learning experience if nothing else.
Anyway, water seems to have pooled inside the bar at some point and rusted through in the corner. The rest of the bar is solid though so i think its probably ok. I will possibly deal with this properly at a later date. I will just have to try to avoid reversing into any trees. *cough*
For now I angle-grinded (angle-ground?) down all the major rust spots back to bare metal, and primed it with zinc based anti-rust primer. Then top coated it in the same enamel black I used earlier. Much better. The mounting points also got the primer treatment too. This should help keep the rust from spreading.
While I was at it I also removed some light surface rust from the number plate mount.
That's it for this instalment. Many more to come.
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