Me and Giulia

Last night we went to see Julie and Julia, the very sweet and inspiring story of Julia Child, and a young woman who chronicled her attempt to cook every recipe from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year, in a blog. I mention this not because lovers of vintage Italian cars all love good food (although I suspect the majority do) but because cooking and restoring an old car are not terribly different. Both require technique, a basic skill set for task at hand, the right tool for the job, and of course plenty of patience. And so mastering the perfect beurre blanc is somewhat like drilling out the spot welds of a rusty body panel in order to remove it without ruining the underlying metal. Which is exactly what I spent an hour or so doing today.

The job requires a special sort of drill bit, which has flat blades and a nib in the center to keep it from wandering. The idea is to cut just through the top part of the metal, while not damaging the metal beneath the panel you're trying to remove. This was my first time using the tool and so far my results are mixed. It seems to require a lot of pressure to get the bit to bite in to the metal, and on one or two occasions it suddenly blew through both pieces of metal, leaving me with a perfect hole. Not the end of the world, but not ideal either. The area I'm working on is in the trunk, where the spare wheel well is, or was anyway. The original metal was so badly rusted that there was essentially no bottom. I have a replacement, but first the remnants of the old wheel well have to come out. The piece itself was assembled to the trunk floor with about 100 spot welds. An hour of drilling and chiseling and grinding and I'm almost half way done. Once the entire part is removed, I'll use my 3M Scotchbrite pad to remove all rust and paint, and then I'll apply some Wurth Weld-through Zinc primer to keep it from rusting. Then the new spare wheel well will get welded in.