You haven’t heard from us in a while because we have been participating in sandapalooza (sanding almost every night and weekend for over a month). Seven’s body is almost, but not quite ready for molds to be pulled from it. There’s still a lot to do. We are characteristically behind schedule.
We’ve filled and smoothed as much as possible with epoxy/faring material and epoxy/glass bubbles. Personally, I prefer the faring material. Once it’s mixed with epoxy to a consistency similar to cake icing, it is very easy to work with. Unless there is a lot of humidity in the air, it takes a while for it to harden so it allows for multiple passes with the spreader to get it just right. The glass bubbles make a nice, light filler, but they are not as forgiving as the faring material. You get one pass with the spreader. Any more than that and it becomes a grainy mess. The bubbles also tend to scar easily – leaving lines and seams when it dries. But it does sand beautifully.
There were some places on Seven that needed to be built up. Particularly the door edges and the front wheel wells. To create something out of nothing, varying weights of other fillers were used. The US Composites milled fiber is a good heavy filler that is not too lumpy to work with. The 1/4″ chopped strand fiberglass is a lot like “kitty hair” Bondo – you can fill some serious gaps with it but it’s not pretty. The 1/2″ chopped strand fiberglass is amazing. Kevin and Nick used it to create part of the wheel wells and that stuff is extremely solid.
This week Seven had the first of many coats of Duratec surface primer sprayed onto it. It’s a high build primer that can be layered up to 40 mil. In the top photo you can see it looks black on the car. The discoloration is the filler resin that hungrily soaked up the first round of primer. Duratec sands easily and after spending so many weeks working on the car we were relieved to not have to put a lot of effort into sanding primer. For more information about the primer, go here.
Next week we will have a professional in the shop to teach us the right way to prep Seven for the molds. More about that later.
Thanks for staying tuned.