Martins SWB Rat restoration: Bodywork improvements

6th February 2011
The body work was looking very much better. I decided that I needed to do a little more work on the body work to make a tighter fit to the body kit that I had fabricated as the work I had previously done on the rear was a major improvement. T

his adjustment process was a great deal easier than trying to fit the body work to the chassis as had been done before as the body lift kit could be placed on the upside down body work allowing easy measurement of the gaps . The front of the bulkhead did not fit tightly and fibre filler was used to bring these areas slightly over the size required so that

they could be cut back. Both sides where increased so that there would be approx 4mm off-standing max. The back area was also sanded to make a crisp mating surface for the body kit. The driver side rear quarter also had a slight bulge in the fibre glass and this was sounded out to ensure both sides of the body work was the same when viewed from the rear of the body work.

With the new filled bodywork

sanded to fit. I decided to use my remaindering Gray Gel coat to protect the newly fibre glassed areas. This tidied and sealed them up.

I realised that I needed to cut a new steering column hole and could find no measurement of the size of this hole any ware on the Internet . I only had a 51mm cutter so used this but in fact to fit the bush a 48mm or 1" 7/8" hole is required. I new I would have to find a different stronger seal.

The next job was to paint the underneath of the body work. I decided to but 2.5L of Black Hammered Hamerite . This seemed very thick and perfect to coat the underneath of the body work. Fortunately my friend John helped me with this painting as it took over an hour for two of us to paint it. Two coats required 2.5L of paint to complete the underneath. The finish was much better than I had expected to achieve and the whole underneath of the bodywork looked like fresh Fibre glass.

Will probably need to shutz underseal it inside the body work before the next paint coat goes on.