...and I thought: "Ohhhh, I can do something with that!" (laughing)
A few months ago, someone in my neighborhood had put this on their trash pile.
They had put it at the end of the driveway with the rest of their garbage,
and for a few days before the garbage men showed up,
I kept driving by it, and so I was bold, and I got out of my car and I looked at it.
And it was in pretty good shape: a little bit of rust, but not anything I couldn't deal with.
So I went and I knocked on their door (I don't know these people) and I said:
"Hey, um, I really think I could refinish this, do you mind if I take it?
And of course they were fine with that.
And now it's in my car.
So here it is in my backyard now, it's been here for a while, but now I'm gonna do something cool with it.
But before I can do anything with it, I'm going to have to deal with the rust.
I started off by using a wire brush to scrape off as much of
the loose paint as I could, and then I followed that up
using my pressure washer to get off even more of the loose paint. After that, I used some
steel wool and a little bit of Dawn to kind of scrub it down a little bit, get a little more of the paint off,
hopefully a lot of the crud off that maybe the pressure washing didn't do. Then I hit it with
the pressure washer again, and then I set it in the sun to dry.
Made myself a cup of coffee while I was waiting,
and now I'm going to use some Navel Jelly to dissolve some of the rust that's still on there.
I'm just touching up a couple of these spots on here that seem to be a little bit persistent with
the rust, but the trouble is with the base coat on this - which I think is the primer, the brown -
you can't really tell what's rust and what's not.
The reason why I sanded this by hand is because if
you use a powered sander on metal a lot of times it has a tendency to buff the metal, as opposed
to creating the rough surface that you want if you're going to be priming and painting something.
Now another option would be to use a grinder or a wire wheel with an air compressor,
but that's not something that everybody is going to be familiar with around their house.
Ideally, actually, you would use a sandblaster on this, and you would just sandblast the heck out of it
to get into all these little nooks and crannies,
But again, that's not equipment most people are going to have laying around their house.
Now, something else that I noticed is that water pools
pretty badly in this thing, so I'm going to drill some extra little holes in it just for drainage.
Will that compromise the integrity of the metal?
Maybe, but you know, I got it off somebody's trash pile, so I'll survive it.
Now you do need different drill bits to drill through
metal than you do for wood, but you can find those at your local home improvement store.
All right, some of these bolts are a little bit loose so I'm
going to try to tighten them up a little before I spray.
Good boy! Come here, good boyI
Drop it.
Go!