Dry Ice Blasting for Auto Body and Classic Cars

This is something that I never thought I would blog about. We have successfully dry ice blasted several classic car undercarriages. This job was definitely a first for our company. Although I have seen several videos of dry ice blasting paint off of cars, it is something that our company has not done. Rather than start with finished paint on the various external panels of a car, we went straight for the undercarriage.

Our customer owns several beautiful classic cars and he likes to keep them in mint condition. He needed the undercarriages of four classic cars cleaned of tar, grease, loose undercoating body patches, and other grime. The reason he was doing this is so that he could have the undercarriages freshly painted. Previously, he had one car cleaned using manual cleaning methods and it took a total of 100 man hours. One of the beauties of dry ice blast cleaning is that it is a much faster way to clean. Below is a video of his classic car collection.



With a day’s labor, Robin and his crew were able to complete three cars. The three cars dry ice blast cleaned were a 1959 Chevy Impala Convertible, a 1970 Chevy Chevelle Sedan and a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix. Our customer was very enthused with the results. It would have taken our customer 400 man hours to clean the undercarriage of these four cars. We dry ice blasted three car undercarriages in less than 12 hours. That equates to about one car every four hours. Plus, there are two people working, so it ends up being a total of 8 man hours per car. That is a 92% reduction in cleaning time on the undercarriage of an automobile. Not too bad if you ask me. Look what our customer said below in regards to this.

“The cleaning process removed all tar, grease, undercoating loose body patches, it was ready for paint after this process a saving of 100 hours! Robin and his crew done a great job and I will, on the next job CALL AGAIN!”

The value of the cars we dry ice blast cleaned is in excess of $200k dollars. Our customer was happy with the way we handled them and was amazed with the results of dry ice blast cleaning. Since we have now completed this type of work, we know we can do it again. Dry ice blast cleaning works great on removing grime, paint, tar, weatherproofing and body patches from the undercarriages of vehicles. It also works well on stripping the exterior paint off of vehicles. I really think this could prove to be a great cleaning method for restorers of high value and classic cars. Lastly, some auto body shops could use it as well.

For more information about dry ice blast cleaning, please visit our dry ice blasting web page. If you have any questions or comments, please call (508) 459-7447 or email rtaylor@nitrofreeze.com.