Stripping off in Winter

Tues.21.03.06. In the relative comfort of my cellar I have begun to remove the paint as well as the undercoat from the engine side panels. Being aluminium I had been able to apply the solvent quite liberally, as a result they have cleaned up pretty well.

 Simultaneously, working at his home in Westmead, Standish, Chris has finished stripping the nose cone but he has become concerned about an excessive build up of filler at the top rim of the cone. This was in part due to the slightly different contour of the bonnet’s leading edge, but I feel that when the two are offered up together there would be a ‘match’. He has also gone through to the gel-coat with the paint stripper, which could expose a future concern. Later in the day, for purely motor trade business reasons, we visited Christopher Neil’s ‘Lotus’ showroom in Northwich. The painters in the workshop are constantly working with very expensive fibreglass bodied cars, so any advice or suggestions that they could render would have been born out of great experience. We immediately discovered that ‘Nitro-Mors’, the substance that we had been applying to the panels, was possibly the most volatile product to use on fibreglass. The problem still remains of removing the blistered paint from all of the panels of the car, without disturbing the ‘gel coat’.

 The task must not also develop into an endless time consuming job. We now have 5 litres of unwanted paint stripper. Not to worry, it had only cost a few pennies, I am sure we shall find a use for it somewhere or sometime in the on coming months