WITH Victoria plunged back into another COVID-induced lockdown, Scotty is back at home working away on our VE Valiant Lockdown Wagon project.

We first got to work on the car at the start of last year in the Carnage workshop, stripping it down and getting it ready for some serious rust repair, which included replacing the entire floor.

However, about midway through that process, that bastard flu started hitting Australia, so we shipped the wagon to Scotty’s home garage so he could continue working on it during the stay-at-home lockdowns in Victoria.

In between lockdowns, we also purchased a spare parts wagon, as it came with a spare set of new-old-stock rear quarters. We kept the latter, but recently offloaded the car itself to the champions at Bumpstop Car Mods & Mentoring, who build cars for a great cause and will make something awesome out of it.

Last week we aired an episode featuring some unseen footage of Scotty sandblasting the wagon last year, before we finally returned to the workshop and couldn’t find time to make more progress on the wagon until now.

Because the car had been sitting for several months, Scotty’s first job was to get rid of the surface rust that’d slowly crept its way onto all the exposed metal. He cleverly used our brand-new Ryobi cordless buffer to get most of it off, before some rust dissolver removed the last of it.

The driver’s-side rear quarter was a big focus of Scotty’s last year. It was so rooted he had to cut the whole thing off to make way for the NOS one we got with the spare wagon. With the quarter removed, it revealed more issues underneath, but in this episode he finally culls those last bits of rust before sealing it with some rust converter and a coat of primer.

Due to the extension announced for the Melbourne lockdown, Scotty will have plenty of time at home to graft the NOS rear quarter onto the wagon, which is exactly what you’ll see in the next episode of Carnage.