Project No-Flight Update
August 2004 Part 2
I really lost track of what was done on what day since I decided to take the week while Julie was in Germany off from work and get all the painting done. By the end of the first day the body was "off" the frame ... at least as far off as it would go with the full cage. Since the side bars are wider than the body sills, the most I could lift it was about 5" in back and 3" in front. I raised the back more so that the rear body mount would be exposed for paint (sorry I didn't get a good pic from the back).
Here is the pile of suspension pieces waiting for paint. The rear housing was painted long ago before it was assembled.
The next step was to transfer the body and chassis to a set of jackstands placed on the lift pads so that I could get at the bottom of the frame rails for prep and painting. Notice how nice and white the drop cloths over the lift pads are ... they won't stay that way for long. You can also see that most of the suspension pieces are already painted and hanging from every available point on the garage roof to dry. I only walked into them a "few" times and had to repaint them.
You can see my exhaust fan and one of the drop cloths attached to the garage door. If I let any paint get on the mahogony door I would be in very deep trouble!!
Last look at the chassis in bare metal. I used a "direct to metal" epoxy paint that does not require a separate primer step. It also has a very high build and flows well over the sanding scratches. I did remember to tape over the VIN tag and body plate so they would not get painted.
There are a LOT of tubes in this chassis to paint, and getting to them all was not easy. You can see that I put a drop cloth on the outside of the open door to catch the overspray, since I started painting from the inside out. That way if I bumped into a tube it would not be one that was already painted (at least that was the plan).
Six hours of continuous painting and about 1 1/2 gallons of epoxy later it was all gray. It would have taken less time but my HVLP spray gun slowly clogged a filter so it kept spraying just a little lighter on each pass. By the time I figured out it was dying it would hardly cover at all on a single pass. I didn't know it had the internal filter, and since the paint pot life was rapidly passing I got out my old spray gun to finish up. It covered great, but left a ton of overspray on the floor to clean. I had to wash the floor by hand with a towel and thinner. In this shot I have already transferred the frame from the jack stands on the lift pads to different locations on the floor so that I could spray the bottom of the frame rails where the original lift points had been and blend in the new paint.
Here are the painted suspension pieces taken down from the ceiling (they were covered to protect them while I painted the chassis). I'm not very good at adjusting the color, but you should be able to see the frame is charcoal grey while the suspension pieces are a light gray to give some contrast.
This is pretty close to the true color of the frame. It's hard to get enough light to get a good picture of the darker frame without washing it out (like in the next picture).
The rear frame was quite a chore to get the gun to all the tubes without brushing the gun, hose, or me against an already painted tube. I got prety good at painting left handed, and would often route the hose through one opening and may arms through another. You can see that the rear of the body is above the rear frame mount so that I could paint the back side of the mount tabs.
Remember the nice white drop cloths? This is also what the floor looked like before I cleaned it. Since the epoxy takes 8 hours to tack and 24 to dry I had time to wash it off before it cured. You can tell where the lift points were for the main painting, and the separate lifts so that I could paint/blend those spots on the bottom of the rails.
One last shot to try and get the color right in the pictures.
Here is the beginning of the carbon layups, the top piece for the firewall. It has to go in before the body is lowered back onto the frame mounts or I can't get it in due to the tapers of the side panels of the birdcage.
Here is the top panel of the firewall installed. I had to put this panel in before lowering the body back down on the frame. The body is dropped and bolted down in this picture. The brake line to the rear was also installed before the body was dropped as it runs on top of the frame and is much harder to fish through with the body on.
