Hi guys, I'm doing well, let me explain the long absence. At the end of March I started six weeks of rTMS treatments for depression, that's where they zap your brain with an electromagnet - no one told me it was going to hurt. So that took me from the beginning of April to the second week in May. I know it's trivial for most, but the whole "having to be at a certain place and time everyday" threw me completely off my routine and I got nothing done of the Corvette. I have been working on it since then and I was going to make a post a few weeks back, but reading on the computer tends to give me headaches and the rTMS treatments seem to have made those more frequent and severe so I've been putting off making a post even though I was ready to make one a few weeks ago.. Despite the headaches. that I'm feeling pretty happy these days and it hasn't been anywhere near as hard to get out to the garage. I managed to finish the upper rear deck to my liking and got the rest of the rear of the car ready for primer and I decided to have another look at the passenger side quarter panel a few days ago. I don't know why, but I'm seeing how straight it is a lot better for some reason and I decided I could improve on it. The last time I worked on the passenger side quarter panel, it wasn't quite right but I wasn't sure where to sand and with what kind of block and from which direction and so on. The past few days I looked at it and I could see what was wrong and once again for some reason I knew how to sand it this time to improve on it. I worked carefully for a few days and improved it but eventually realized I needed to add more fill if I wanted to improve it further. So for the past couple of days, I've been trying to sand down evenly the fill I applied and not mess it up

 

Glad to see you are back with us and making some progress.
Keep smiling and keep up the attention to detail.

 

Good to have you back, Priya! Lou.

 

Wow you have accomplished a lot. Congratulations.

 

Welcome to the club! They didn`t tell me about the "side effects" of chemo drugs either. All they said was.... "It`ll help you. It won`t kill the cancer, but it will stop it from growing. We give it to LOTS of patients!"
But then, I suppose if they`d told us "This stuff will F you up".... we`d have told them to stick it where the sun don`t shine! Glad to see you back. And remember..... if you don`t get ______ done today, it will still be there for you to work on tomorrow! And if you ever need somebody to laugh at, cry to, or bitch at..... send me a PM.

 

Ditto.

 

i haven't even made a pass at you and you are already playing the headache card! so, they failed to mention side effects. big whoop! wait til you get your prostate out. yeah, it barely works and you know that much. what they fail to mention is the 2 inches of urethra that runs through the prostate that leaves with the prostate shortens it by that same 2 inches! but i digress. need pics of your rear end. i mean the corvettes rear end...

 

They actually did warn me that one of the side-effects was headaches so I agonized for months over whether to do it or not thinking if it's going to give anyone headaches it'll be me. I'm hoping with time they'll settle back to what they were before I got the treatment.

 

Another of those who utterly and completely shame me for my laziness. Great to see you. Laugh often,it helps. A lot!

 

You're probably a lot less lazy then me, go back to the first page and look at when I started this project
And I don't have a job like so many here restoring cars..

 

I just retired June 02, 2022.
After 50 years of either getting up and going to school or to work and sometimes both, everyday, is a hard adjustment.
I’m not complaining because now I do have time to work on my projects and actually see some headway.

 

i don't know if unemployed or retired. got let go 2 months into covid. in may. 2 years of not caring what day it is except for getting the trash out. trying to stay out of the soc sec cuz it is 8% a year. i will probably be driving sr citizen van for a bit. great way to pick up girls. find friends for the wife and her ma...

 

Glad you’re back at it! Feel better!

 

That's just terrific, PRIYA .

Now I have to start working on MY car (again) to keep up with you.

 

When I last left off I was trying to refine the rear upper deck and I was having trouble in the area where my body fill meets the original brown paint as shown by the circles in the picture below:




I could feel a dip or a bump where the body fill meets the paint but I couldn't tell what exactly was wrong. I had been trying to keep from sanding through the vette panel adhesive/filler and down to the underlying fiberglass so I could avoid covering the area with fill again. Eventually I figured out that I needed to sand more filler and fiberglass out in the areas below the green lines in the picture above regardless if that meant I went back down to the fiberglass and had to recover the area in filler.

You can see the problem in the picture below. The brown line represents the side profile of the upper deck where the factory brown paint hadn't been removed. The blue line represents the side profile of the filler in the trough before the ducktail:



To get rid of the transition I could feel where the paint met the fill I needed to remove more material in the area indicated by the black arrows (above).

I decided to remove more of the factory brown paint higher up the rear deck to give me more area to transition the fill evenly to the factory paint:








As I figured would happen while I was removing more fill just ahead of the ducktail I broke through to the underlying fiberglass (yellow areas) and had to refill those areas:






And here's the upper deck as smooth as I think I can get it and ready for primer:




To aid in seeing the highs and lows I used the light in the picture below at a low angle with the garage lights out to better see the areas where I needed to remove fill. This worked pretty well:

 

Then it was time to take on this crack I found just ahead of the driver's side rear wheel opening:




This is what I had when I feathered out the edges of the crack in preparation for matt and resin:




I put tape behind the crack and around the front side of it to minimize the size of my repair:




I laid down some wax paper and pre-cut pieces of fiberglass matt for the job:




I added the matt and resin but as you can see in the picture below it was hanging below the wheel lip in a way that wasn't going to put enough material there to make the repair:




So I added pieces of tape to the still wet fiberglass matt and resin to pull the material back up where it is needed. I find this works pretty slick and do it quite a bit now to save time by not having to add more matt and resin to an area that didn't get enough:




Here's the back side of the repair after the first application of matt and resin:




And sanded with 80 grit so I can add more matt and resin to the inside of the crack to make sure it's thick enough (the pictures I took of that didn't turn out).




Here's the outside of the repair after I've sanded the new matt and resin mostly back to flush:




I had some voids in part of the repair so I had to sand it back down below flush and add fresh matt and resin to get a solid repair. The West Systems Epoxy resin is thinner than the polyester resin I normally use and it has more problems with leading voids. Next time I'm going to try leaving it out in the garage when its perhaps 55 Fahrenheit to hopefully get it thick enough not to leak away:






The matt and resin taken down a bit below flush so I can cover the exposed fiberglass with Vette Panel adhesive/filler:




Ready for the vette panel adhesive/filler:




The filler hardened and partially sanded down:






Sanded all the way down but needs more filler:




I had to add more filler in the area shown by the blue oval:




And here is the repair completed, sanded down with 120 grit and ready for primer:'

 

After I got the upper rear deck to my liking I decided to take another look at the passenger side quarter panel and decided I could do better. The problem area was right in that tricky area where the horizontal body character line meets the rear wheel lip opening, I had that area sanded down too far/didn't use enough filler. In the picture below you can see lighter grey where I've sanded with 80 grit inside the black lines in preparation for adding more filler. The orange arrows show where the horizontal body character line is, you can see the two Sharpie marks I made on the quarter panel just to the left of the second orange arrow.






I forgot to take a picture of the Vette panel adhesive/filler after application, but in the picture below you can see where I've sanded off most of the fresh filler:




After removing the masking tape used to avoid getting filler where it isn't needed you're left with a ridge about 1/16" thick around the repair area that needs to be sanded flush to the surrounding area but no further down. You can try to do this just with your finger on a piece of 120 grit but that doesn't work so well. What I found works best is to take a rectangle from a paint stir stick and wrap 120 grit around it and then gradually work your way around the edge tapering it to flush as shown in the picture below:




The 120 grit wears out quickly on the thin edge of the square of paint stir stick so you have to keep rotating the sand paper to make slow progress bit by bit. I use a light at a low angle to where I'm sanding to better see the high and low areas. Once I've finished feathering the outline of the repair area to the level of the surrounding good body work I use a small flat block to lower the rest of the repair area down to flush with the surrounding body work.

It turns out I sanded off too much so I had to reapply filler to a slightly smaller than the original repair area and try again:




Here I've got the sanding in that tricky area almost done:




Sanding the area where the mid quarter panel horizontal body line meets the curve of the wheel opening is pretty tricky, I found the curved sanding block shown in the picture below works best:




In the picture above I am moving the sanding block from left to right and as I get to the curve of the wheel opening I rotate the block as shown by the blue circle/arrows. If you're sanding immediately below the mid quarter panel horizontal character line to get the block moving horizontally I find you have to push upwards as you move the block to the right as shown by the brown arrow (lighter grey area sanded with 120 grit). Similarly if I'm sanding the area just above the mid quarter panel body line as I move the sanding block from left to right I have to aim downwards to get the block to move parallel to the mid quarter panel horizontal character line.

And here the passenger side quarter panel is yet again ready for primer, lol. I actually improved on it significantly, the extra filler is mainly in the area outlined in brown:




I took a look at the driver's side quarter panel again and noticed some minor flaws in that same tricky area where the mid quarter panel horizontal character line meets the curve of the wheel opening. I decided I don't think I can improve on it so I again left that quarter panel alone.

So now I've got the entire car behind the rear doors sanded with 120 grit and ready for primer! I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out and glad I took the extra time to do the best job I felt I could It took longer than I thought it would, but I got a cold or the flu or something a few weeks back and the headaches got really bad and I couldn't work for a couple of weeks.

 

Thanks, doorgunner!

 

Glad your back adn ready to tackle the rest of the car. Will you be starting on the front soon?

 

That's a lot of blending going on there! I like the notes on how to avoid extra work on the same areas by using masking tape.