Project No-Flight Update
November 2005
The summers project turned out to be stripping all of the old layers of paint from the car. It has been green, yellow, brown, and the right front fender top was originally red, the left door originally blue. Of course there were layers of red and gray primer in between all of the colors. None of the strippers I tried would touch the thick green layer, which I’m guessing might have been Imron, so in the end I sanded it all off, going down one color at a time to keep things smooth. I did block down some of the waves in the fiberglass itself when I got down to the last coat of primer on the parts.
Here you can see the meriad of different donor panels that the car has received during it’s lifetime. The rear clip is pretty much all the same. The drivers door was originally blue so came from a donor car sometime, and it’s fiberglass is a somewhat different shade of gray. The back parts of the front fender tops appear to be OEM panels, but not from this car and not from the same car as they were originally different colors, one was red the other yellow. I don’t think GM ever used pink fiberglass so guess that the bottom rear of the left front fender is an aftermarket panel. The white panels I knew about as I grafted those in when I stretched the wheelbase and shrunk the size of the front wheel openings. The nose was known to be an aftermarket piece as it was the very rare “headlight delete” option.
I knew the car had some roof damage as I could see some repairs on the inside of the panel as well as the birdcage rail. Once I removed the ¼” of bondo I could see where they had crudely patched a slit in the roof and re-riveted the fiberglass to the birdcage. I had already discovered that the right windshield piller was replaced when I was working on fitting the doors. I’m going to try to improve the fit at the top of the door without adding quite as much filler as previously (wish me luck).
I have some work cut out for me to clean up the previous graft of the front fender tops. It looks like they didn’t grind all of the old fiberglass down quite far enough when they fit the new fender tops as they are high compared to the doors. I’m rebuilding the contours to match using some epoxy filler I discovered. So far I like working with it, and it is supposed to have much more strength and stick than the polyester fillers.
The drivers door is a further clue that the fenders are a little high, they tried to fair them in and ground clear through the fender ridge. I’ve since filled that back in with fiberglass mat and resin, and will build up the door contours using the epoxy filler the same as the other side.
The graft to the one-piece front end isn’t too bad. The gray on the front piece is gelcoat not primer, so I didn’t sand it off. You can see from the bleed through spots that the gel is smoothing out quite a bit of irregularity in the glass layup. Given all the mixed pieces I probably should have replace the entire front clip in the beginning, but I have so much time in it now I might as well carry it through to the end.
The only oops from the paint removal process was cutting through a thin spot at the leading edge of the bumper riser. I’ll re-glass that from the back when I get the car back on the lift.
A couple interesting artifacts are shown here, one is where a chunk of the original skin had lifted. They just bondo’d it back down (I think they consider bondo over 1/8” thick to be a structural repair). I lifted it loose and re-laminated it, and will grind and re-glass a fillet region around the edges.
You can also see an area where it appears the resin has lifted out of the weave. It is the same on the other side in the same place. I tried adding some resin to the areas but wasn’t happy with the result, so will probably try to fill it with the epoxy filler.
You can see that the fiberglass color of the passenger door doesn’t match the rear body either, but the paint sequence on them was the same, so I don’t know if that door was original to this car or not.
Since the car was in gray primer when I got it, and is now bare gray fiberglass, it hardly looks like I accomplished much with all my work. I wish I could get access to a paint booth to paint it myself, but it looks like I’ll have to let a body shop door it. I am anxious to get some paint on it so I can proceed with the rest of the assembly (plus I’m getting tired of bodywork).