It's the progress that you can't hardly see, photograph, post to the internet for fake points, or explain to your wife that adds the most to the overall quality of the build and often takes the most time. It's also that progress that is hardest to stay motivated to do, so good job for doing it and thank you for keeping it up!
Woot!
Forward movement last night.
When it came to this roof panel, I was not sure if I should be consulting with bodymen or phrenologist for advice on how to proceed. So, when it reached this point I was pretty happy. I might have been able to make it a metal finished roof panel, but only at the expense of a calendar month and the chance of berkeleying it up totally.
Never body filled a panel this big and since it was going to take a fair bit of mud, might as well mix it right on the roof panel. This is the second cow-plop worth of filler as you can see. All told, I smeared about 1/3 of a can of filler to skim the whole panel about 1/8" deep.
And then we sanded. Put a good solid hour on the boards to get the first coat to about as low as it is going to go. YOu can see where the grey zones are starting to be visible through the filler. That is how thin the stuff is. Once you reach this stage, you need to put the sanding blocks down. This is your common denominator level and unless you decide to do something about a high spot, you cant go any further because any more sanding is going to make holes/waves.
You can get a pretty good idea of what % of the filler came off by looking at the gutters on the car and the plastic curtain I put up to keep some of the dust out of the car.
The floor and myself were both equally powder coated. The Minion on the other hand, being yellow already, must be accorded some kind of professional courtesy because, despite being garbed in black , had no dust on him.
I want to hope that two more sessions will complete the roof panel.
Pete
Nice! Keep it up.
Whoa man, hope you have a big sanding block!
Nice work- it's easy to get lost in the cloud of filler dust. Looking forward to seeing this in paint!
damen
And second and a half layer on.
By the time the first layer was sanded down to a common level, the roof was fairly well defined and flat. So being happy with that, I wend and mixed up a bit of mud and filled in just the low spots and scratches. Once dry, I knocked the spreader marks off those spots and then smeared the entire panel with as thin a layer as possible.
My thoughts are that with each low spot addressed individually, and a thin layer added on top, plus a thin layer over the rest of the panel, I should be able to sand down to the common layer I had before without the risk of removing too much from what used to be the common level. Does that make sense.
Pete
Well, your approach to reaching a flat surface seems sound to me. Now, you've got a lot more filler on that one large panel than I'd be comfortable with -- I think you'll have cracking problems eventually -- but that's just me. Even if surprised, I'll be as happy as you if it all comes out right and stays that way for a good long time. That's the outcome I want for you.
watching for truck use later.
But Momma wants a new Minivan.
In reply to MichaelYount :
Agreed that there is more filler than I would like, but there is a lot less than you might think. If there is an 1/8" of mud anywhere on the panel I would be surprised. Other than on the spots that were low on the first pass, ALL of the second layer that covers the entire panel is going to come off. The only reason I even put it on was so that I did not inadvertently sand more off the base layer while blending in the low spots that I had filled in.
Plan is to go sand this lot down tonight and then shoot a quide-coat to see what the panel has to say.
Fallback plan if this stuff fails on the roof is to make it all smooth, pull a plug off the roof and make a carbon fiber cosmetic cap with exposed weave just cause I always wanted to play with carbon fiber but have not had an excuse.
Pete.
NOHOME said:In reply to MichaelYount :
Fallback plan if this stuff fails on the roof is to make it all smooth, pull a plug off the roof and make a carbon fiber cosmetic cap with exposed weave just cause I always wanted to play with carbon fiber but have not had an excuse.
Scary Pete -- I find myself in that situation regularly......almost hoping what I've chosen to do won't work so I can go ahead and justify trying the thing I really wanted to anyway!
Tired of sanding and waiting for the dust level in my lungs to go down a bit, so for fun, drug some late(r) model Mustang lights out of the Minion's stash and bolted them on. Not sure if factory or aftermarket parts, but they run H4 bulbs.
Pete
Aftermarket. No 7 inch round automotive light (except for jeep) ever ran capsule bulbs.
Hella e coode housings would be money well spent.
Dusterbd13 said:Aftermarket. No 7 inch round automotive light (except for jeep) ever ran capsule bulbs.
My eurospec e28 5 series BMW has 'em, although the ones in the picture above do look like aftermarket.
I have a slew of 7" H4 housings. We had a discussion about them about 5 years ago and someone posted a link to some AC VW site that sold them cheap. So I ordered sets for all 4 cars I had at the time that take 7" bulbs. What I didn't realize is I was buying PAIRS of housings. So I ended up with 8 sets of the danged things. Oops. Another tid-bit I didn't realize is they didn't come with bulb sockets...
ceramic sockets on ebay to handle the watts.
Back in the day, you could get the 7's from Hella, Cibie, Marchal...off the top of my head.
In reply to Ian F :
What brand???
Need some for the duster....
sand, fill,sand fill, sand....
3 hours later. Spray with guidecoat and pray
Long block with 80 grit. Just a good scrub, not looking to remove filler
Hell yes...I can live with this. I don't see much of the guide coat in this.
Next time you see this panel it will be in 2k primer.
Sweet! 
Now I don't feel so bad about paying someone else to do this on my TR6. I've done enough paint prep to know that I really hate doing it. Keep up the good work. I can't wait to see this car in color.
The minion just sent me these pics from the fist day of mudding the roof
Like a BOSS...
Not like a boss, you, sir, are the boss.
Yellow and blue. Apropos.
Lat night was dust clean-up night. Swept up two piles of about this same size. Then I let loose with the leaf blower!
Pete
Panel-wise, I am down to two last items.
1-I am going to re-skin the RH door. Even though I have done a lot of work to pull the skin off, wheel it into shape ( sort of) and re-install it on the frame, such that I am at the point where I could mud-over it and be done, I was lucky enough to have someone send me some door-skins that were surplus to requirements ( he is doing a total re-body of his P1800 with a Ferrari shaped alloy skin, you guys should know who that is since he lurketh on this board with his own buld thread! ). So all I need to do is unfold the new skins from the remains of the door-frame and install on my door frame. A month or so ago I considered unfolding a door skin an improbability at best, and now I seem to be doing it as a matter of course only begrudging the time it takes!
2-The lower 3" of the rear valence needs attention. And by "Attention I mean it was rusty so I cut it out entirely. My original plan 2 or so years ago was to push the "EASY" button and buy a repair panel. Yeah right. As with pretty much all of the repair panels that I bought ( about $1000 worth ) it would have been just as easy to start with a piece of flat metal. Under my "start at the front and work my way to the rear plan, this is now in the line of fire to get done.
Looking down from the top of the tail-panel below the tailgate.....See how the edges of the repair panel don't curve in to meet the rear panel? You can't just push those edges in to meet the curved rear panel. There was no effort to shape the panel in three dimensions. It will require a few passes on the e-wheel and maybe a bit of shrinking and/or stretching along the top edge.
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