Final Body Work Lacquer and move to my new garage

13th May 2011

My painting of the body shell was drawing to an end and with more than 16 layers of SP2000 UPOL lacquer on the body work it was time to put on a top coat. This meant the whole body work needed flattening off and I called in support troupes to help me with this arduous task. My best friend Jon came to hand wielding his orbital sander pictured left. This worked surprisingly well as long as the area was washed continuously with water.

I decided that I was not getting a very good finish with the Lacquer coat using the Earlex Pro HV5000 as the needle size was to large being 2.0mm . I therefore decided to make use of my home built compressor which I had built earlier in this blog. I borrowed an Italian Asturo 1.8mm spray gun see pic left from a friend to use with my compressor and started spraying. I found the best results was achieved by spraying the gun to let the pressure build up out and this was at half trigger then when i wanted to spray pull the trigger in as I started a run of lacquer along the body work. This seemed to work well . I found I could also hold the gun on this short burst to blow out runs that I had created. I coated the body work with 600ml of lacquer thinned at 21:1 with a dash of thinners. I repeated this twice. The body work was left for four hours before it was bolted onto the chassis.

I bolted the chassis through the body lift kit in about 15 places so that it was held firmly to the chassis the car was then pulled from johns garage in the evening and towed with an A Frame behind his van. We arrived at the new garage before dusk.