Scottie - Cheers, although I am pretty confident that I will NOT be finished this year.
However, I am starting to get my hopes up for being on the road "some time" in 2015.
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"That is going to look amazing!"
Said with an Eastern European accent, by a young man walking past as I worked on the car today.
It really lifted by spirits, especially as he was looking at the rear of the car, which looks a bit of a mess in my eyes.
I needed the encouragement as today's work didn't quite go to plan...
Monday:
Perpetual drizzle outside, so no work on the car.
However, I finally spoke to
Jawel about the "Truck Coat" that I want to hand paint the car with.
They were really helpful and talked me through what I would need to prepare and paint the car.
Essentially there would be three steps:
- Etch primer ( As the body shell will be a mix of gel coat, fibreglass, fibreglass filler & normal filler.
)
- Normal primer / under coat
- Top coat
I am looking forward to seeing the body shell at the etch primer stage, which should make all the construction scars "disappear".
I've had another thought about the final colour scheme for the car, but I want to keep that up my sleeve for now.
I also ordered some bolts and nuts for the aero screens, as they were not supplied with any.
Tuesday - Part 1:
The good news is that I finally got the chance to remove the former from the scuttle.
The bad news is the tarpaulin doesn't keep the water out when the body shell is upside down.
But the really bad news was that I tipped the water out "sideways" in stages, collecting more water as I went along:
Driver's wheel arch > driver's hump > passenger wheel arch > ground.
This seemed fine until I turned the body shell the right way up and could still hear water running?
Looking underneath there was a stream of water coming out of a rivet hole under the Passenger hump.
So either the water leaked in there under the tarpaulin, or I poured in there myself when emptying the body shell.
After tipping the body shell up and down to get the bulk of the remaining water out, I eventually stuck the hump in the sun light to dry out.
But first I started to work on the top side of the scuttle which looked like this.
After a quick tidy up with the grinder.
In addition to these strips along the joins, I added some matting "scraps" across the area as well.
When all the fibre glassing was done it looked like this.
Another small area I made a start on was where the driver's door joined the body shell and looked like this.
Thankfully, there was a lot of extra matting underneath.
So I ground it down from the outside, before adding some extra matting along the join.
Hopefully by the time I've added filler and sanded it all down it wont look too bad.
Then there was a bit of a break while I had my hearing tested and the results were not good.
( All those years of riding motorcycles without ear plugs have finally taken their toll. )
Now I have to go back in a few weeks for a further assessment in order to get a pair of hearing aids.
In the mean time I've ordered a pair of "headphone style" ear defenders to go with my foam ear plugs when using noisy toys.
End of Part 1...