The story thus far (part three)

[Adam]

With the welding completed and the rust proofing and body deadening were applied we then brainstormed as to what the next task should be. The stock paint was fairly faded on the horizontal surfaces so we decided to respray it, not one of us had the slightest bit of car respraying experience, but that wasn't going to deter us, after doing far too little research we started trying to strip the paint, first sanding was attempted, but this proved excessively labourious so we resorted to chemical paint strippers, nasty stuff, and we didn't follow the instructions which lead to extra work, but eventually we got all of the bonnet/boot/quarter panels back to bare metal. There were a few pinholes (really just the size of pins) of rust in the bottom of the quarters, but by this time the MIG was safely back at alans, so whilst I regret it now, we used fibreglass reinforced bog to repair this, before the gorilla hair was applied we first gave the metal a coat of rust converter to hopefully halt the rust.

Once the panels were bare and repaired, I wandered down to autobarn and picked up 4 litres of primer/putty, 4 litres of Atlantis Blue Metallic Acrylic, 4 litres of clear and 20 litres of thinners. I then begged Alan to borrow his spray gear and tried my hand at spray painting... I could paint primer fine, so that was done, we rubbed it back, doing our best to get a smooth body for painting, this involved multiple coats of primer filler in some areas, the occaisional bit of polyester body filler (AKA bog) to level up small imperfections, once we had what I thought was a good body, I tried my hand at spraying the colour and BOY did I suck, tiger stripes, runs, you name it.... so we sanded back the bits that I had painted and let Alan wield the gun, of which he did an excellent job. At the time I couldn't have been happier with the resuly, but now with a more discering eye, I have noticed that while Alan's spray work was top-notch, my body preparation could have been better. Particularly the driver's door, but that is something I will rectify in future.

With the car painted, including the door jambs, engine bay and the insides of the doors we left the car for two weeks before buffing the paint to a beautiful shine.

At this point I headed off to autobarn and picked up a set of four monroe GT Gas shock absorbers, which were fitted sometime later, in value for money terms, these shocks are hard to beat, whilst the ultimate is still a good set of konis, at over 4 times the price they were too expensive to justify.

Once this was done we started on reassembly, the engine and gearbox went in first, then the quarters, the bootlid and the bonnet. Then we got to with all the little things, from headlights to taillights, we just spent an hour or so every day bolting on a few more bits and the car gradually took shape. At this point we measured up the door openings and boot opening and bought new door/boot rubbers by the metre from clark rubber, I can't speak highly enough of these.

To be continued...

(no pics because I've temporarily misplaced them)