About a week later I was doing some work on it and oversprayed carb cleaner onto some of the brown paint. I discovered (by accident) that carb cleaner takes paint off just a layer at a time, it doesnt strip it off all at once like so many of the paint strippers you can buy at the hardware store. I bought several brands of carb cleaner before I came to the realization that B12 Chemtool is what I needed to use. I dont know what they put in it but wow, B12 is some powerful stuff! I decided that instead of doing a full sandblast and repaint to the whole thing, that instead I would take it down to the original paint and see what was there.
--I should pause this story to explain that this is not the first time I have worked on this jeep. My mother inherited it when I was 14, and from when we got it, I wanted to see what the paint looked like underneath. It was my on and off project for a couple of years, but I was younger, inexperienced with vehicles, the internet was a new thing and I didnt have access to all the information I do now. My dad loaned me a sander and I bought a chiltons manual and some fine grit sandpaper.The exposed hood numbers and star are a result from that bit of work I did when I was 14-15. That was also the last time it ran. I rode in it twice before it was parked in the garage at my parents house, then moved to a photography studio where it sat for a number of years.--
Fast forward 15 years, and after two months of work and roughly $300 worth of B12 Chemtool, this is what it looks like.
The jeep has at least 3 layers of military paint. Here you can see I have partially recovered three different stars on the rear quarter panel on the drivers side.
View of the drivers side after taking most of the brown paint off. The paint removal around some of the lettering is not the best, but after you get so far through the brown, the white of the lettering wants to come with it, so care has to be taken.
This part of the grille took about three hours to complete, I thought this was a nice comparison shot of what it looked like, and what it looks like now.
Completed grille. It was really hard to get the B12 evenly distributed on the bars of the grille. I would get spots where the brown would come off relatively easily, and then spots where it wouldnt. I had to be very careful with the overspray in order to not take off the green paint adjacent to the brown i was trying to remove.
The blackout light, and other small, removable pieces had to be taken off and done separately. Just like the slats on the grille, the blackout light with all its many different surfaces and planes was very hard to evenly coat with B12. One of the problems I ran into was that some of the brown paint just doesnt want to come off no matter how long i let the B12 sit, or how hard I scrub. I learned this the hard way on parts of the back, I ended up taking too many layers of green paint off while trying to get the brown off. Some of these places have a very camouflage look about them, due to the different shades of green that were painted on it over the years. You sill see these spots randomly in the pictures. After much deliberation I have decided to leave these brown spots, as it adds to the rustic, used look of the jeep, and I never expect it to look show quality. It was used by my mothers uncle as a hunting rig on some family property, and I have no problem with it not being perfect.
The partially cleaned backside. This is where I started with the paint removal process. This was very much a learn-as-you-go type of process, thats why the back looks the worst of any surface I removed paint on. The back was my trial run.
And the passengers side.
This is after I put the carb back on. I was changing the plugs and wires that night. I went with some MSD 8.5MM wires that a friend had leftover when we put new wires on his truck. These were the extra lengths with extra MSD boots that we had.
I have reached my 20 picture limit, is there any way I can get a photo album extension or anything? Id be willing to pay $5-10 to upload more pictures so I can continue the thread.
