Point taken Gentlemen.
So, how hot do I need to get the panels if I'm going to make any bubbles rise through the surface? Will I need to keep the heat gun on the spot until the primer starts to blister?
I'm still wavering on this one - Mike says it's an essential step and he knows what he's talking about, but Phil went ahead and sprayed his two cars without heating the shells and clearly, as his cars have been on the road in all weathers for more than a year with no issues, he knows what he's talking about too.
I had a chat with Phil about it yesterday, and we've come to the conclusion that the runaway success of the Spyder and the (over?) expansion into the G46, Cordite and 550 projects led to some, ahem, quality control issues with the bodies made some time after I picked mine up in July 2011.
Having seen a few of the late mouldings on this forum, it looks like the gel coat is rather tenuously stuck to the fibreglass, as if flow coat was slapped on afterwards rather than gel coat put in the mould.
The early body shells that Phil and I got, however, appear to be of
much better quality. The dark grey gel coat isn't just stuck to the fibreglass, it's integral to its structure. Perhaps that explains why Phil hasn't had any voids appear. Could it be that there just aren't any?
And finally, I've hacked and chopped bits out of my body shell all over the place. I've chopped up the flat dash moulding to reuse elsewhere and cut, shut and bonded in the 550 dash. I've ground out half a dozen 'star' cracks that I caused by being heavy handed with the shell while moving it about, and I've completely sanded the shine from the gel coat so the etch primer could key to it.
So far, I haven't found a single void.
