Stripping the bonnet

When I had the car blasted to strip the old paint back to bare metal the guy told me that he wasn't happy about doing the bonnet because he was worried that he would put too much heat into the metal and warp it.

At the time I thought that was fine as it wouldn't take me long with my wire wheel brushes. However when I tried to strip the paint away it was taking ages and making a horrendous noise that would probably go on for so long that the neighbours would probably complain.

So I thought I would try using paint stripper instead and as luck would have it I found a bottle at the back on my shelf.

It said it would work on metal so following the instructions and thinking I'd have the whole bonnet finished by lunchtime I painted it on and left it.

Two hours later and with scraper in hand I started to remove the paint. Trouble was that it hardly removed anything, just a thin layer and not evenly either. Some parts it came off easily others nothing at all.

So I repeated the process and 4 days later I eventually got the rest of it off. Turns out there were about 9 layers of paint!

After a clean with warm soapy water it was looking better but there was still small patches of primer left and a general scum.

So with the wire wheel brush I cleaned it off and after an hour it came up really well.

And with a degreasing and wipe down I applied a nice new coat of primer it is looking a lot better when compared to before.

Also had to sort the underside. This was much easier as the paint was a lot thinner and the wire wheel brush coped very well.

Need to finish the seam sealing on all the edges to make sure it doesn't get in such a state again.