Jan '16 - More bodywork

More bodywork

My initial game plan was to store the chassis in a cheap Harbor Freight carport on my back porch while I worked on the body. Idaho's windy weather had other ideas. Foolishly thinking 300 lbs. of sandbags would be enough to anchor it down, the wind picked up the carport and flung it into a crumpled heap in my next-door neighbor's back yard, luckily not while their kids were out playing, and without causing any damage to the car, fence or neighbor's house. Oops. The local store manager was sympathetic and even refunded the cost - what a guy! So, I ended up buying some wheel dollies so I could shoehorn the chassis in between the Mustang (also hibernating for the winter months) and the pickup. It makes getting in and out of the truck a little cramped though, but beats parking the truck outside in subzero weather all winter.

After grinding any gelcoat of the mold parting lines, the next step was to mix up a badge of the Rage Gold filler and spread it into the seam, then sand it flush with the surrounding surface with 80-grit on a long, flexible board, matching the existing contours as smoothly as possible. Here is with a fresh batch of filler applied:

Then here it is again after hours of block sanding sanding sanding. Each time the contour gets a little closer....then it's also necessarily to fill in pinholes that become exposed - actually tiny air bubbles that get created in the gooey filler. The filler is a two-part system - you mix together a yellowish base material with a bit of blue-colored cream hardener, stir it up on a mixing board until it's a uniform green, then you have to spread it onto the body like peanut butter, pressing it into the holes and gaps you're trying to fill until it's ideally just above the surrounding surface. It hardens in about 20-30 minutes, then you sand it smooth, and repeat over and over until all the contours are as smooth and even as possible. A bit tedious and there's a bit more 'art' to it than building the chassis and mechanical parts. Fiberglass is much easier to work with than the hand-hammered aluminum bodies on the original Cobras.

After three or four rounds, I head the seams up to my satisfaction - maybe not quite what a pro painter would want to leave his shop, but I'm building a driver, not a trailer queen for car shows. I don't plan to just sit around and rub it with a diaper!

At this point, it was time to put the body back onto the chassis, line it up as it will sit and fasten it down where it attaches underneath the frame below the doors, and put the doors back on the hinges. This is the area where Factory Five's molds still suck and require quite a bit of fill work. Here's the body back on the chassis, body buck flipped on it side in the back.

The front and back edges of the door have to be built up a bit to form a nice contour with the body shape. There is quite a bit of adjustment available in the door hinges, but not quite enough. It took four rounds of adding filler and sanding until I was happy with the alignment here. This shot is after the first round...it also took a bit of buildup on the body, in front of the door down the side, to match the contours.

The driver side is usually needs the most work, here's the first round of Rage prior to sanding. It took five more rounds on this side, at the door tops and along the bottom edge. Getting the door gaps absolutely perfect is a big deal for some builders, I'm just going by appearance, once they're close enough and look good, it's good enough, I'm not going to worry about getting a precise 3/16" all the way around. Once these are lined up closely enough, the body will come back off the chassis so I can round off all of the edges, finish up the hood and truck, and shoot some Slicksand primer. Overall it's going faster than I thought.