Repairing & Painting The Ragtop Upper Header Bow
by Garage Weasel on Jul.22, 2021, under General
When I first disassembled the car, I wrapped most of the larger parts in plastic wrap and placed the largest ones in the attic. Last year, I decided to bring the ragtop parts back into the shop and work on them. I cleaned up, sandblasted, and powder coated many the smaller parts, but just hung the longer parts up in the shop. I did a little work on these parts like removing the rust and treating the really rusted parts with a rust capsulator. After that, I moved on to other things and the parts remained hanging there for nearly a year. Tiring of having things hanging and in the way, I went to work to get them completed. I started with the upper header bow. This part is on the top of the front of the ragtop. It goes directly over the locking bow that has the handle that you use to open, close, and lock the ragtop. The outer part of the ragtop cover tucks under it in the front and it is the part that clamps down on the roof when the handle is locked.
Below is what the upper header bow looked like when I unwrapped in from the plastic wrap. It was very rusty from being wet all those years and even where there were still parts of the ragtop cover on it, it still got wet and stayed wet for a very long time. On the leading edge of the bow, it had a foam strip where it made contact with the roof. Water apparently seeped under there as well and the bottom side under that foam strip suffered the same rusting and pitting that the exposed top side did.
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To remove the rust, I had to soak this piece for about a week in Evapo-Rust. This product does not remove the base metal and only removes the rust. I would soak it for a day or so and then rinse it off to remove any loose rust particles and put it back in. Once it had removed all the loose rust, I sandblasted it. There was still some minute rust particles down in the pits, so I sprayed it with a rust converter to seal those areas. I let that cure and then this is the condition I left it in a year ago.
Since this is going to be covered by the ragtop cover, I decided to fill in the pits with body filler and paint it. I filled in the pits, sanded it smooth, sprayed it with primer, and then sprayed it with Eastwood Extreme Chassis Black. I think this will seal it up and protect it fairly well. It is a little wavvy, but it will be under the ragtop cover and not seen.
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