Great job straightening everything.
You are wrapping up a quarter panel...and I are trying to lay out masking tape on the tunnel catastrophe
I'll try and catch up....sooner or later.

 

You've accomplished considerably more than I have. Sooner or later you always get back into it well.

 

Looking good Priya! You're doing great paying attention to the details! It will be great when you finish!

 

While I got next to nothing done on my Corvette this summer, I did find time for important stuff like creating a fake wi-fi/satellite radio antenna for my 85 Oldsmobile. I probably spent 20 hours on this and $50. Why? Because I think its hilarious. It seems to be working, the other day I was shopping and coming back to the car in the parking lot and I saw two young guys standing beside it, pointing and laughing their asses off




So this is my daily driver for the last several years. I've got a Corvette and the Eagle in my avatar and this is what I drive. One day I was stopped at a light and a car going the opposite direction was also stopped at a light and this guy looks it over and says to me "nice car, lady.". Hubby says I should have said "for $10,000 it's yours."

 

How did you get the Patina so flawless?

 

I spent countless hours working on it to get it just right. I'm going to be entering it in a car show next spring

 

 

So this is my daily driver for the last several years. I've got a Corvette and the Eagle in my avatar and this is what I drive. One day I was stopped at a light and a car going the opposite direction was also stopped at a light and this guy looks it over and says to me "nice car, lady.". Hubby says I should have said "for $10,000 it's yours."

You should have said, "36 more payments and it's mine."

 

Now that would have been priceless!

 

Oh the absolute joy of having the perfect words at the tip of one's tongue! 😜

 

I've worked on the car for 7 weekdays in a row, that's pretty good for me lately. I think maybe the new anti-depressants are kicking in. I feel motivated to work more on the car but my body says any more than I'm now doing is going to give me an over-use injury.

I'm really struggling trying to get this quarter panel shape right. All those subtle compound curves and I'm not even really sure what its supposed to look like. And of course it turns out I wasn't really done with the passenger side quarter panel bumper mount area, it had low spots and I've had to fill and sand a couple of times: It was a bit of a search to find the side marker lights so I could check the fit as I contour this area but I eventually turned them up.

 

Just remember one thing about the bumper mounting area. It’s going to be hidden by a bumper. It’s kind of like bottom paint on your boat. Nobody sees that but the fish.

 

"I've worked on the car for 7 weekdays in a row, that's pretty good for me lately. I think maybe the new anti-depressants are kicking in. I feel motivated to work more on the car....."

Give yourself time to adjust to new meds/"new feelings"! It's kinda' like when you "get over" the flu or bad sinuses. Your body/mind feel so much better that you want to catch up on everything that 'didn't get done" while you were feeling bad.

Enjoy feeling better and trim a couple days off the Vette work

Get back into the groove slowly so you don't get a case of "early burn-out".

 

I've been averaging about 3 hours a weekday on the car and that feels like about my physical limit.


It's been slow going on the panel seams. I had some voids in the fiberglass work on the seams as you can see the white spots to the left of the blue line in the (driver's side) picture below. I took a die grinder with a small rounded stone and ground out the voids, as you can see in the picture to the right of the blue line.




I wanted to cover the entire seam area up until the top of the quarter panel which took far too many fill and sand and fill steps. It was hard to get enough filler on the high crown areas of the upper quarter panel so that I didn't sand through it to the SMC underneath. I used a lot more Vette panel adhesive/filler on the panel than I would have liked, its pretty pricey at $117 for two quarts. The blue arrow in the picture below shows the oval where the SMC is showing underneath the filler:




I had been using an air powered inline sander to sand down the panel seams and decided it went too fast on the high crown areas so I used a hand board with 40 grit as shown on to of the quarter panel n the picture below:




I moved the hand board at a right angle to the seam and it cut down the high fill relatively quickly when I really leaned into it. I know Dub said he sands the filler before it get's completely hard but I never had any luck with that, it just gums up the sand paper right away. I put a piece of blue tape on top of the quarter panel to indicate where I had previously sanded through the fill to the underlying SMC to make sure I got enough fill on it. After I sanded that down I found a couple of other areas where I still went down to the SMC, so I said screw it, that'll have to do. I think on the driver's side I'm only going to use enough fill to cover the fiberglass over the seam instead of filling all the way to the top of the quarter panel.

As I mentioned, I've been struggling to get the passenger side quarter panel right and I feel like I'm going to be able to do a good enough job. I've been doing a lot of sanding with the lights off in the garage, holding a light at sharp angles to the panel to help show high and low spots. That's worked pretty well to a point but I was still unsure about what I had. The spousal unit suggested I wipe brake cleaner on the panel to get a shine and see how it looks. I tried that but didn't have much brake clean left and it flashed off pretty fast so I wasn't able to study the panel at all to see if its right. I decided it wasn't a good idea to wipe the panel with a flammable liquid and then have the furnace come on and ignite the fumes. I went back to spraying the panel with water and I managed to get it smooth enough to see the panel looks pretty good but two low spots stood out I couldn't see with just the light at a sharp angle. Unfortunately the low spots are in the most complicated part of the panel where the horizontal mid-quarter panel character line meets the wheel opening. I've been having some trouble trying to wrap my head around how to sand this area to get the right shape but I think I've got it. You can see the fill I added in the picture below:




Again the blue arrows point to the original SMC showing through.

Getting that sanded down the right amount without taking too much off is going to be tough but I think I can do it. One of the things I learned when applying the filler is to go around after I've put it on with the spreader and push down the high edges of the soft fill with a finger and taper them to the part of the panel with no new fill on it. This makes it a lot easier to get the edges around the fill area sanded down because you don't have a big step between the new filler and the previously sanded filler.

It's been -10 C a few nights here and there and so far no mice have made it into the house so I'm cautiously optimistic that they're not going to get in any time soon. So, it looks like the work I put in on the house paid off (as long as I didn't jinx it by declaring victory too soon)

 

You and DG remain inspirations to me. Thank you.

 

You may notice in the pictures I've got body fill over the top of the brown paint which is a no-no. Everything I've sanded so far has been with 40 and 80 grit so I can reapply filler. When I go to 120 grit I'll remove the filler over the paint until I've only got filler on the original SMC. Then my plan is an epoxy primer and then perhaps a couple of coats of high build primer. I'm not sure at this point if I'm going to primer just the rear first and leave the front till later, or fiber glass the panel seams on the front clip, block out the brown paint with 120 and primer the whole car at once. My original plan was to primer the back first and leave it without any sanding until I've got the front end and doors done to the same state.

 

Poor frozen meece! The U.N. will hear about THIS!

 

They'll never take me alive!

 

 

Frozen meeces? What about the frozen peoples? My hands hurt just hearing the words -10! You got guts working in that kind of weather, even if the garage is heated (Yes, I am a wimp!). And that is part of the reason you will be done before me!