Project FD RX7 Restomod: Part 5 – Dry Ice Blasting Restoration

If you love your car and especially if you work on it, Dry Ice Blasting restoration is a MUST.

Dry Ice Blasting is outright incredible.  It is a cleaning process that is booming in popularity in recent years and for good reason.  Nothing else is this invasive, gentle, yet effective at restoring surfaces to their former glory by lifting decades of dirt, oil, dust, and grime from the original metal, undercoating, and sound deadening material.

We took our 30-year-old FD RX-7 to get restored by one of the pioneers and most experienced people in the automotive dry ice blasting industry – Jakob of I AM DETAILING & Dry Ice Auto, located in Costa Mesa, California.

It is just so satisfying and therapeutic to see years of muck just melt away and reveal the original surface that hasn’t seen daylight in decades.

BEFORE:

Before Dry Ice Blasting, our FD RX-7 was pretty typical of a 3-decade old car.  Road grime and buildup mixed with oil vapor and minor leaks have built up over the years

AFTER:

After Dry Ice Blasting, the entire undercarriage is pristine from the aluminum control arms, rubber boots, plastic panels, and stainless-steel exhaust.

WHAT IS DRY ICE BLASTING?

Dry Ice Blasting does not use any chemicals or even water in the cleaning process, so there is no concern of corrosion, damage, or electrical problems typically associated with pressure washing or aggressive cleaning of engine bays and undercarriages of cars.  The only residual mess from dry ice blasting is from the original grease and grime that is removed from the surface.

This amazing process takes small pellets of dry ice and crushes them into tiny fragments, which are then shot out of a nozzle with compressed air to clean surfaces.

As the sand-sized pieces of dry ice impact a surface, the explosion of the dry ice vaporizing from a solid to gas lifts grime away from the original surface