Painting is finally
scheduled for the upcoming weekend. I know we were all expecting more progress on this front, but
painting is something we don't want to rush into. It takes a lot of careful preparation and setup. We
have to pull all the body panels off the car, do some final trimming, and then sand all the
fiberglass and etch all the aluminum. It's going to be a real challenge to get all that done by
Saturday, but we're excited about it.
Rivets totally hidden under the primer
Part of the prep work involves hiding the rivets on the rear fenders. We finished that up last
weekend. It only took about five coats of putty and primer, although we can't really claim that all of
the rivets are invisible. But most of them are, and we expect the thick 2K urethane primer to cover
the rest. The good thing is, the fenders are really stiff with the flanges attached, and light too,
just a couple of lbs. each. The fenders actually turned out to be of the few things on the car
that we got right the first time.
Giant heat shield with oversize brackets
Unlike the exhaust heat shield. The Locost book has nice pictures showing exactly how to make the
6 brackets that attach the heat shield to the muffler, but they're drawings, not photographs. It
turns out you can draw things in steel that you can't actually make, like for instance sharp 90-degree bends.
Our bends weren't quite as sharp as that, so our brackets ended up about half an inch too tall, which
turned the heat shield into a giant cylinder about the size of a washing machine drum. We'll try
making the brackets again in a few weeks.
Will look better covered in foam and vinyl
We did a better job fitting our fiberboard interior panels to the car, although it took a while.
We trimmed the panels for things like seat belts and handbrakes, then drilled 1/8" holes at various
places around the panels so that we can eventually attach them to the chassis with sheet metal screws
and cup washers, just like they did fifty years ago. First, though, we need to cover the panels with
foam and vinyl, but we're not going to do that yet because we don't have any foam or vinyl, and
besides, it's way too early to be finishing up the interior.
Although that didn't stop us from fitting the carpet. We do have carpet, enough to cover the
floor from the front of each seat to the firewall and the front of the transmission tunnel under
the dash. Unfortunately it's not genuine M.G. carpet, but it's a nice black color and the vendor
described it as "luxury" automotive carpet, so it'll probably be good enough. It's pretty thin, though,
and cuts easily with scissors, but maybe that's part of being "luxury" carpet. Maybe the cheap
stuff is harder to cut. Okay, probably not.
Almost as nice as real M.G. carpeting
Eventually the carpet, seats, and interior panels will cover up everything inside the car except the
outboard footwells. We're okay leaving the footwells open because we need all the space down there
we can get. We fit the carpet into the car but we didn't glue any of it to the floor. It'll be a lot easier
to do that when the body panels are off the car and we can reach in through the frame tubes.
Down the road if the carpets ever fade or wear out, we can just get some of that carpet spray paint
and spruce them up a bit.
We're coming up on our July 26th deadline for finishing the bodywork, and it looks like we're not
going to make it. Our checklist has 19 tasks left, and over 100 hours, so we're probably going to
fall a couple of tasks short. The painting should be done by then, but it's unlikely that the body
panels will be back on the car. So we're extending the deadline, but in doing so we're taking a
page from the semi-failed San Francisco Bay Bridge project and chalking the extension up to our
overriding concern for safety.
We think that on or around August 15th we'll be able to close the book on the bodywork phase of this
never-ending project, and move on to something else. We're not behind schedule, mind you, and we're
not late. We just want to be absolutely sure the car is safe from a coachwork perspective before we
let anyone drive it.
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