1939 Ford Tudor Project

Project Freeway Fats is a ’39 Ford Tudor sedan. In this series of build-up stories, we’re detailing the fabrication, restoration and assembly of the car using some of the top builders in the country as sources. Many of the build-up techniques involved are common to all street rods, and many more are common to all types of hot rod projects, regardless of year, make or model. Project Freeway Fats is designed to draw upon those techniques and illustrate how to build a reliable, durable, daily-driven street rod. The emphasis is less on flash than on function, and the greatest stress is being placed on the car’s handling, performance and safety.

In any project buildup, proper paint is crucial to the appeal of the finished product, and a good paint job begins with the thorough preparation of the vehicle’s surface. In some instances, original factory paint that has been correctly roughed is an excellent base for laying on new color and graphics. In other cases, however, it’s best to remove all of the old paint—sometimes many layers of it—to evaluate the soundness of the underlying steel, to determine what bodywork should or must be done and to spray a newly primed foundation for fresh colors. That’s particularly true of cars that have been painted several times as well as those that, like Freeway Fats, have 55 years of history hidden under their pigment.

Drezek Environmental Stripping Systems (DESS), where our ’39 has received a new Bitchin Products firewall, dash and floor, specializes in the clean and safe removal of old paint. DESS utilizes a high-pressure blasting method to strip cars and trucks to bare metal, but the blasting medium is either baking soda or a combination of baking soda and slightly more aggressive media for heavy-duty cleanups such as deep rust pockets. Baking-soda blasting strips only paint from the car, leaving all rubber, glass and chrome unaffected. Body filler is also unaffected by the process, so previously repaired areas may be evaluated after stripping and either left intact or reworked. If desired, DESS can also strip the filler.

Baking soda also offers poststripping benefits. Paint components can be separated from the medium and, because it is biodegradable, the residual baking-soda medium can simply be washed away without fear of harm to the environment. In addition, baking soda acts as a rust inhibitor, so the vehicle can sit coated in the blasting medium for a reasonable period of time after stripping without the formation of new surface rust. DESS stripped the ’39 to bare metal in only a few hours. The same results, if done by hand with abrasives, would take days and require extremely meticulous detail work around body creases and seams. At the end of its stay in the blasting booth, the car was ready for primer, any needed repairs and the custom sheetmetal touches we had planned.