We Almost Have a Reflection!

We started sanding with 320 grit on the nose this week. Besides loading up the very fine grit with dust more than twice as fast as the 180 grit did, the 320 grit is creating a very smooth surface. By accident, we discovered a mirage effect when we sighted down the sanded surface. It is best captured in the following picture, and was very nice to see!

Speaking of milestones, unless we hit a major snag we are done spraying Slicksand! We now have to sand everything with 320 grit. That'll keep us busy for a couple of weeks. We have a long weekend coming up in mid-October. It'd be great if we could spray paint then, but I'm not sure we'll be ready.

Below left, you'll see freshly sprayed Slicksand. You can see the small pebbling of the surface. On the right, you can see what it looks like sanded to 320 grit. You'll need to supersize these to see the sanding scratches. I noticed that the blog software no longer allows you to just keep clicking to zoom in. If you want to really zoom in, you can click once, then right-click and save the picture locally for viewing.

Slicksand tastes terrible

...and we should know. We've created enough sanding dust to last us a while.

This week the weather was great, and we made lots of progress with the body. You can tell from the lack of guide coat on the car just how much of it we've already sanded. Once we have the body sanded with 180 grit, we'll need to spray two more coats of Slicksand on it.

We paused long enough on Saturday to put two final coats of Slicksand on the hood. The hood and doors are now ready to sand down to 320 grit.

We're hoping to finish sanding the body this week, put Metal Glaze in the many pinholes we've found, and prep for the final two coats of Slicksand next weekend.

Tropical Storm Lee has come and gone

As expected, last weekend was a washout with 7 inches of rain. We pulled the chassis into the garage and sentenced the storage buck to 3 days of rain wrapped only in a couple of tarps.

Yesterday we made the most of a beautiful day. We applied 3 coats of Slicksand to the body. Each coat used 32 ounces of Slicksand and required refilling the spraygun halfway through each coat.

You missed seeing the guide coat on the nose, so here are a couple of pictures with guide coat on the body.

I mentioned pinholes last week, and they showed up on the body. They're easy enough to get rid of using Metal Glaze.

I also failed to take into account just how curvy those fenders are while spraying. Because the fenders flare outward, the spraygun ended up too close to the fender in places and caused sags and runs. It was a good lesson to learn while spraying this stuff, because it is easy to sand off the extra. It won't be so easy if I do this while spraying clearcoat over the paint later.

Remember, you can keep clicking on a picture until it zooms in far enough to see LOTS of detail. :-)

You'll notice in the second picture above that the runs (indeed, EVERY flaw!) are easier to see with the graphite guide coat applied.

Now we're back to sanding until next weekend. With any luck, we'll have the body and the nose ready for two more coats each by next weekend.

Game Called on Account of Rain (well, wind!)

We had plans to spend 2 of the 3 days this Holiday weekend spraying Slicksand, and started out early this morning working to prep the body before the expected high winds arrived. Unfortunately, Tropical Storm Lee was just close enough to bring us 10-15MPH wind.

That is too windy to spray outdoors, and I really don't want to make a mess of the garage by spraying Slicksand in there. By tomorrow, the rain will be here and it won't leave until Wednesday.

So, we focused on sanding the hood instead. While you weren't looking, we put guide coat on the entire hood and sanded it off of almost all of it. The only area left to do is the passenger side headlight area.

You'll notice a number of dark spots on the hood. This is referred to as "burn through", places where we've sanded through the Slicksand to the original gelcoat (or filler) beneath. It is not a problem, as we will spray two more coats of Slicksand before sanding to 320 grit.

In this nextpicture, you can see a couple of small craters that we found on the passenger side fender. These usually occur along the seams between the pieces of the body. Smaller ones are called pinholes, but these are a little bigger so I call them craters. We have a special Metal Glaze product for filling these, so we'll apply that before we spray more Slicksand on the hood.

As for the storm, the chassis is hunkered down under a tarp. We have more than half a dozen bungie cords holding the tarp together under the car, so it should stay put. The storm will bring lots of rain, but only enough wind to spoil today. :-)