Jay attends the casting day for the new Resident Evil film...
OK gonna do one post to cover the entire weekend. I didn’t have time to do one for each day, it was all a bit hectic! (and depressing). At the time of posting this only my pictures are live, neither Jay nor Jon have uploaded theirs yet. Here goes…
Friday
New tools (Yay). I popped down to B&Q with Jon and picked up a bitching little electric screwdriver and bit set as recommended by Robin. Also got a Random Orbit Sander do to the sanding for the paint work. This was VERY worth getting, and I can see it being used a lot. We didn’t want to do any actual work on Friday as the only tasks we could do at the moment are large ones. We popped up to the car anyway to loosen a few more bolts, tidy some stuff up, collect some tools. I also picked up the H bar that supports the nose cone and dashboard, and the dashboard itself, so we could look at them at the house.
Finally I dug out a copy of AutoCAD with the intention of planning out the new dashboard now we have dimensions for the gauges. I’ll probably get Jon to do this as he’s pretty hot with the CAD software. (Well, compared to me anyway.I can do SketchUp but that’s about it!)
Saturday
Sanding down the nose cone
We blagged Jay to bring his Mum’s convertible down so we could fit the nose cone in it sticking out the top. We couldn’t fit it in my car because it’s larger than my boot (being a windscreen it would be). We then sanded it down using the wonderful random orbit sander mentioned above, washed it down with white spirit, and then the weekend of fail began.
First coat of green paint
Stupidly, we rushed it. We applied the primer, and it started to rain. Had we being thinking straight we would have at this point rushed it into the garage and finished it another day. What we in fact did, was quickly erect a canopy over it and wait for it to stop raining so we could continue the work. On and off all day we played the running in and out of shelter while spraying game, until finally we had primer, paint and lacquer all on there. It looked a bit patchy, but it did look fixable, so we decided wait for it to leave it overnight and thoroughly set to sand down the areas that were unevenly coated. One thing was clear though, that green is amazing.
Sunday
Oversleeping didn’t help. Sunday was glorious weather, and we missed half the day tired from the day before. Jon went out in the morning to have a look at it, got out all the tools, and got to work. 3 minutes later he had written off 2 sanding pads on the sander and a sheet of 400 grade sandpaper. The combination of the 6 coats, the rain, the damp air, and the rushed job, had turned the green into BluGreen-Tak. It gummed up all the sandpaper and pads and basically just made a mess. I was extremely depressed at this point. Massive waste of money and time on a project with a now even tighter time constraint.
After various different attempts and methods, we found the best way to rid the bonnet of this goo was to combine white spirit and sandpaper to lift it off the surface, and then quickly hose down while scrubbing to wash it off and away. I went and picked up Jay, and we spent most of the day just sanding all of the nose cone back again.
The only progress we made over the weekend was to sand the rust off the H-bar. I would in fact say overall this weekend we made negative progress, wasted a lot of cash. and I got green shoes… You live and learn.
