Bob's Component Resto, Part 2: The Battery Tray

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cruiser

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Hello all. I hope you enjoyed chapter one last week and are hard at work on your radiators right now. This week we'll look at the resto of the battery tray from my 1974 Duster. The battery tray is one of the most abused parts of an older car. Most of the time, they are nearly destroyed by battery acid which has over time leaked onto the tray and eaten it away - along with the adjacent portions of the inner fender and underside of the hood. Modern batteries in our MOPAR rides are all sealed units and no longer have the vented caps that were used to add distilled water to the acid cells. The tray in my Duster which I bought in 2106 was particularly bad. My car had 229,000 miles on it when I bought it and was probably on its tenth battery. When I pulled the cruddy battery that came with the car, I discovered a gallon sized Ziplock bag under the battery - likely placed there to protect the tray from acid corrosion back during the Reagan administration. Out it went. Fast forward to last month, when I finally pulled the tray. It was really bad with significant corrosion damage including the left front corner which was completely eaten away. After removing the tray, I spent an hour cleaning up the inner fender and radiator core support adjacent to the battery. It was covered in 47 years of oily crud and corrosion, which I cleaned out with gasoline and Dawn detergent. When this area was clean and dry, I bead blasted the tray down to bare steel. At this point, I had to decide whether to restore my original tray or buy a new repop on Ebay. I was all ready to buy a new one, but upon closer examination it was clear that the repop ones are not exact. They're generic units that lack the correct contours of the original. So for those of you thinking about buying one of these Taiwanese repop trays, don't plan on it looking original. They're pretty good, but if you want it to be exact it ain't gonna happen. Back to my now bead blasted tray. I could see that I had enough to work with, and ground down the eroded corner to present a smoother appearance. I then hit it with two coats of gray primer and three finish coats of custom blended JY9 Tahitian Gold Metallic spray paint from a NAPA paint shop (see the finished photos). The upper side of the tray is still quite pitted (even after painting) but is mostly concealed by the battery. Once dry, I cleaned up and used the three original captive washer bolts to reinstall the tray into the engine compartment. Two of the bolt heads still have factory original 47 year old paint on them. Next in went my Group 24 repro dry cell MOPAR green cap battery, fastened down with a correct repro mounting strap and a set of nearly perfect original hold down bolts and nuts. The battery negative cable was clipped onto the side, and all is well. The tray will now live a pampered new life next to my motor, blissfully free of that nasty acid. Check out the before and after photos, and a shot of the car it went into. Be well and stay tuned for our next installment. Sleep tight!

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Looks great. I restored an original tray for my 67, and bought a repop for sonny's 69. After sandblasting and epoxy priming, I had them both sprayed with the same bedliner stuff I had my truck done with. I brought them with me, and asked the bedliner shop if they could spray these with the leftover liner material. Worked just great.
 
I have coated my trays with the Flex Seal from spray can. Love that Phil Swift formula, it coats so evenly.
 
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