Two Down, Two to Go

We finished the hood and the passenger door. Both are now ready for SlickSand.

We turned out attention to the driver's door, which needed a lot of help. First, we mocked up a special jig to fabricate an extension to the top edge of the door. This is a result of removing a little too much of the top of the door in early fitting.

The brown layer is a piece of vinyl baseboard molding from a hardware store. The 2-part filler called Everglass that we used won't stick to vinyl, making it perfect to help us mold the door edge. We also used a 3/16" square dowel to give us a nice flat edge.

We clamped all of this to the door with a thin piece of plywood so that the vinyl was in contact with the whole length of the area to be filled. We then filled the area with Everglass. It worked like a charm! We had a couple of real small voids, which now have Rage Gold in them. More pics of that later.

We also went back and sanded the edges of the doors and doorframes round. Until now we've been very careful not to round anything over, so this added a nice finishing touch to the surfaces we've been working on.

We have a few mechanical items to attend to before we are ready to pull the body back off of the car. We'll also need to build a painting buck for the body. Look for that in the next couple of weeks!

Closing in on the first of many spray jobs

We pulled the hood back off of the car so we could flip it upside down and deal with the bottom of the nose. We had several places that needed a little Rage and sanding. At this point, we just have three small areas to sand and we will be able to call the bodywork DONE for the hood!

Speaking of the hood, we built a buck last weekend to support the hood while we spray it. We have four more leg braces to install before we can set the hood on top of it. The goal is to have a buck for the body and for the nose that allow them to sit level and roughly where they will sit on the chassis. This will help us get a good color match between the body and the hood.

Except for the fenders right in front of the doors, the body is ready to come off of the chassis. There are a few spots that are difficult to finish sanding with the body on the chassis, so a buck for the body will be built for sanding and painting.

We're finished putting Rage on the rear end of the car. The lower fenders need a little more sanding once we get the body on a painting buck.

We also put the last of our HSRF on the inner skin of the driver's side door. We're closing that chapter out, and in the next couple of weeks we should be finished with Rage as well!

Filling in the Low Spots

We continued our assault on the low spots where the doors meet the fenders, and have also been working to smooth the transition between the spoiler and the body.

We're happy with the passenger side door surface. I do need to reduce the door gap a bit. You can see it is larger than the driver's side door gap. The driver's side door needs one more quick touch-up with Rage. You can tell where it is needed as the unsanded darker green Rage reveals the low spot.

Notice the "grain" of darker and lighter colors. Those are the various layers of Rage that we put down, then sanded through to get a smooth surface. This is a great product to get a smooth surface, and we will end up using most of 2 gallons of it.

The rear of each door required much more work. Both doors sat up above the fender, but at the same time didn't stick out as far as the fenders. As a result, we had to add Rage to both the door and the fender to get it to line up. With one more application and a careful sanding, we should be ready to finalize the door gaps. The gaps back here will need to be a little wider due to the shape of the door. The top inner part of the door swings pretty close to the fender as you open it, and we don't want it knocking paint off later when we close the door.

In the picture below you might just be able to tell that the body beneath the door is sticking out a bit. We'll pull a washer off of each of the body-mounting bolts to reduce this, but we might end up adding a little Rage to the bottom of the door as well.

One last look across the front edge of the spoiler. We took some flexible plastic tubing and cut a section out of it to make a rounded trowel for smoothing the Rage between the spoiler and the body. It turned out really well. If you click on the picture below to expand it, you might just be able to see the darker green line where the edge of the trowel fell off of the spoiler surface and left a low spot. This is easily fixed with, you guessed it, a quick swipe of Rage.