Stripping The BRE Baja Z

1975 The BRE Baja Z -Now In Sheep's Clothing For Street Use
Dr. Logan purchased the BRE Baja Z from BRE with the idea that is would be easier to de-tune a race car for street use, than it would be to performance tune a stock example. So shown below is the BRE Baja Z, with stock hood, bumpers and a silver paint job. Dr. Logan said he drove the car on the weekends for about a year then stuck it away in storage.

Pictured Below: Here the Z is being disassembled, the engine compartment has at this point been "washed" with a low pressure washer and Simple Green detergent. The car was originally white, the black you see was used to black-out the engine compartment when the car was repainted silver for street use. Most likely done with a rattle can, most of the black paint and much of the original white washed off.

The firewall, shock-towers and front frame rails were galvanized metal, so after 31 years even the original white paint was flaking off the galvanized metal.. shown as gray in the picture. You can see some of the BRE Red paint that was under the silver.

Pictured Below: Here is the engine compartment after it was bead blasted. The "red" area's are the original factory primer that held to the plain sheetmetal. The gray areas are the galvanized panels from which the original primer has separated completely.

Pictured Below:Rust Free Battery Stand and inner-fender. You can see that the bead blasting left a little to be cleaned up by hand. Looks like silicon sealer or tape glue.

Pictured Below:This was the condition of the rear deck area. I removed the carpet, jute padding and the tar sound/heat insulation. This left a lot of the glue used by the Previous Owner to glue everything down. The "black" is mostly dirt trapped in the glue. The white is the original paint, the "yellow" is also glue. Some surface rust on the passenger floorboard, because I took the tar matting off and didn't spray the shinny metal down with Ospho to protect it for a week.

I had hand stripped the left shock tower and part of the left hand side of the rear deck area. That was when I decided that the entire interior needed to be stripped by bead blasting.

Pictured Below: Here you can see the glue, dirt etc on the right rear shock tower, in the inner panel of the rear quarter etc.

Pictured Below: After bead blasting -pretty clean and almost ready to prime. A little hand detailing and clean up is all that's needed at this point.

Pictured Below: Left corner of the deck lid threshold plate. Most Z's rust here. This car is perfectly rust free.

Pictured Below: Right corner of the deck lid threshold plate.

Pictured Below: Here you can see a small dent that has been repaired in the past, on the quarter panel. Bead Blasting won't take the body filler out.

Pictured Below: Here you can see a couple small dings, that have been filled in the past, but other than them, the car is about as rust free and straight as any 240-Z I've ever seen. But then, it only has about 12K miles on it now - and all of them have been in the dry weather of Souther California and Baja.