Project No-Flight Update
October 2004
I painted the steering column and installed it so I can again move the car around. I decided to paint the column to match the roll cage instead of body color, didn't want to get too many colors in the interior. I think the dash panel will be black, I "may" face it with the carbon fiber if I get good enough. If not I might skin it with vinyl to match the dash pads (which will also be black).
While I had the wheels off I thought it was also about time to work on adding new fender lips to the rear wheel wells. The prior owner had opened the wheel wells for the bigger tires (the back edge is cut back, the front edge is in the stock location, allowing a slight increase in the wheelbase over stock by moving the tire centerline back about an inch), but had made new fender lips from big globs of body filler. I poped them off by splitting them from the original body panels using a putty knife and hammer and ground the back sides to bond on new fiberglass lips. I made "molds" for the lips using metal tape, then added several layers of a very conformable weave fiberglass cloth (I used the 4 harness weave as it will shape to the compound curves easily). Here are the "during" pics of both sides. Once the fiberglass is cured I'll trim the lips to width (they are made much wider than the final width) and fill and blend any rough spots.
After curing a couple of hours (polyester is fairly rapid, especially if you warm up the garage with the heater) the metal tape was removed. The nice thing about using the metal tape for a form is it comes right off, the fiberglass doesn't stick to it's adhesive side. You can see where the glass was shaped by the tape and where the excess is.
I made a simple marker holder to make a line at the width of the fender lip. A quick cut with a cutoff wheel in the die grinder and some hand sanding using a piece of 80 grit wrapped around an old radiator hose and you end up with new fender lips ready for a final filler and sanding.
