Body work and Gel coating the rear seating area

18th November 2009
Since making my rear body support I had noticed that the rear seating area that it attached to on the left side was not allowing it to sit straight. This was mainly caused by the fibre glass seat area work that I had undertaken in Mad March affairs with the CSP Torque bar installation and rear body modification but not been able to get access to. Luckily with the engine still out I was able to dismantle the body support and the torque bar to give access to the area under the seat. Where I had moulded the shape on cardboard sections there had been some seapage underneath that was obstructing the off side body support bracket. I used a rotary disk sanding attachment for my drill with an 80 grade disk. This cut the area back so that it was in line with the bottom panel. The process was slow going but rewarding as it gradually came back in shape.

The next problem was going to be how to remove the gel coat from the areas where I wanted to fibre glass were they were very close to the chassis or suspension. I had to think about this as I didn't want to spend a lot of money buying a Black and Decker rotary file. I remembered using a carpet layers knife in the past and set out to see if I could find one to see if I could cut the old gel coat off in slices.

When I cleaned up the left hand side I noticed that the bracket came back into orientation. I had to fill the holes I had made to mount it originally, I cut the surounding area down with the rotary sander from both sides and re fibre glassed from both sides to make a strong bond and re drill to bolt to its new location.

I was going to try to get my grey gel coat in a jar from the last place I got it made up a small fibre glass company. Unfortunately I believed they had moved on so a new search was on to find another company that would be so reciprocating. The red I thought would only come from one source as its not used commercially or so I thought. Luckily a search using the Yell search engine provided me with a surprise that the company Castle Mouldings I had purchased the original gel coat was still trading and would happily still sell me gel coat. This was great news and the gel coat was applied using a brush to the new fibre glassed panels. The red was quite a bright colour and hoped that it would merge with the existing coat overtime as the grey had done some years previously. I used about 5% catalyst with the gel coat as it was quite cold . I mixed up the grey gel coat and coated the underneath of the seat area. Some of the underneath was not accessable and I new I would have to attend to this at a later date. After considering the areas I had gel coated I decided to cover the whole rear seating area. The fibre glassing work that had been done on the underneath of the body whilst on the car had not been done as neatly as I would have liked with the body removed. I am hoping that at some point in the future this can be re addressed.

I also managed to sell my twin manifolds and linkage kit I had bought prior to deciding to go turbo. This was going to be helpful as I hoped it would allow me to buy an inter cooler for the engine. The search was now also on to find one. I was not sure after searching through the classifieds online whether this was going to be easy.