....and I ain't even French. I went into the garage on Saturday and tried to work on my hood repair again. Long story short, I had a crack in the right corner above the latch for years. I ground it out and filled it in with Fiberglass mat and epoxy resin from Ecklers for SMC panels and finished it with a very light skim coat of Ecklers SMC filler. For the past 6 months I've struggled with bubbling, shrinking and in general a crappy repair. Saturday I kept sanding everything smooth and then hit it with the heat from a few halogen lamps. Every time I hit it with the lamp it either bubbled or shrank again. It got to the point where I realized that I had almost 1/16 inch of primer and sealer on the area because I kept trying to isolate the repair from the topcoats thinking it was reacting to the lacquer thinner. I took the hood off and stripped down the corner to inspect the repair. The mat was not hard and the fiberglass strands were loose and absorbing the stripper. I tried to sand it smooth but the repair just wouldn't cooperate. Finally, I thought of the line from that Allison Kraus song " Gravity". "I just grew tired of falling down " I went online and put in an order for an Ecklers L88 hood. When it comes in I'll fit it and paint it and be done with it. I may try to grind out the repair on the stock hood and reglass it but it'll be way down on my priority list. I'll also be very leary of using Epoxy resin again. I've never had problems with the polyester resin I've used before and may go back to it in the future. I mixed the eposy according to directions but it took hours for it to harden to the point where I could sand it. Somethings wrong with that. In any event I won't make that mistake again. Just as a data point, I've been doing paint and body work on this car for over 15 years and this is the first time I've had a problem like this.

 

Oh, for a minute there I thought you were gonna sell her and buy a C5.

 

After these past few months I was tempted at times. But how do you sell something that's become a part of you over almost 20 years.

 

I've only had my PIA for 9 months and I already feel the same way.

 

I've recently used epoxy resin for the first time on my body work.
Good strong epoxy takes a long time to cure (at least 24 hours).
The 5 minute stuff is crap. The epoxy is also more flexible and tough to sand.
I'm going back to polyester resin, I think.

 

The epoxy resin I used took overnight to completely cure and when I sanded it the resin way hard to the point that I used a die grinder to take off the major parts and a DA to smooth it out. Problem was every time I hit it with paint (lacquer in my case) it seemed to absorb it and then either shrink over time or outgas if the panel was in the sun. I think I'll stick with polyester resin too.