As the engine work has come to a halt, and I'm stuck here not able to leave the house and with more free time than usual, I figured that getting stuck into some time consuming jobs that are essentially free would be a good use of my time. 
This boils down to two car related jobs basically, firstly to spend some more time sorting the paint (I've got painting supplies on the shelf in the shed) and secondly seat repair and recolouring (I've had a leather recolouring kit patiently waiting in the shed since Christmas).
As the sun was shining, I started with the paint. Cast your mind back to early November when I was left no choice but to paint the doors in less than optimal conditions. The main downside of this was that the finish from the gun was terrible.
Thankfully I knew this might be the case and so made sure to put a good depth of clear coat on. This meant that at some time in the future (which happens to be now) I could wet sand the paint to get rid of the orange peel...
...and then compound and polish it to get a proper shine.
That's better! I don't own any fancy polishing tools or anything, so this will all be done by hand, I did say I'd got some spare time didn't I?
Anyway the previous pictures are all from testing one small section of the passengers rear door, time to scale this up to the whole car! Several hours later and the whole car was wet sanded, and generally looking a bit sorry for itself.
Those of you that have long memories may also remember that in November that I wasn't happy with the colour match on the doors. At the time I was worried that the 2nd batch of paint I'd had mixed up was the problem. The paint did settle in a bit as it fully dried, but I was never especially happy with it.
Wet sanding the whole car down gave me a sort of blank sheet to judge the colour matches by, without distraction of the differing surface finishes. What I could quite quickly was that the paint match issue wasn't with the 2nd batch of paint that I did the doors with, but the problem was with the 1st batch of paint that I did the engine bay, back edge of the front wings, sills, B posts and under the rear window with. I did try to take photos, but it all just looked red and it wasn't helpful, so words will have to suffice! It's weird how sometimes the camera hides these things and at other times it multiplies them.
With the now flat consistent surface, I could see a distinct colour change (slightly more pink/less brown) in the sections that I'd painted with that first batch of paint. I could also see that my 2nd batch of paint was actually a good match for the areas of the car that I haven't painted, such as the rear wings, boot lid and the front half of the front wings. As I've still got a reasonable amount of the 2nd batch of paint, and time and weather on my side, I decided yesterday to pause on the polishing and to instead blow over these problem areas, consisting of the back edge of the front wings, the sills, B posts and round the bottom of the rear window.
So yesterday afternoon I went back over the areas to be painted with a slightly coarser grit wet and dry paper to make sure I had a good key, then set about masking the car up.
Luckily I'd over bought masking tape and bought a roll of polythene dust sheet material when I was painting the living room, which made masking up easy. The polythene is great for masking off big areas I've got to say. Today dawned just as bright and warm, though a touch windier, but still it could be a lot worse, so I got stuck in.
Much better painting conditions, results in much better paint finish. My main problem today was pollen coming off the trees, but I just made sure to wipe down the car between each coat of paint and in the warm the sun the paint was flashing off pretty fast so thankfully very little got stuck in the paint.
With the masking removed it looks more mismatched than ever, but in real life you can see the colour is much more consistent, and I'm really pleased. A couple of days well spent I say.
I will have to wait a couple of weeks before I can polish the freshly painted bits, but I can still get on and polish up the rest of the paint in the mean time which will keep me busy for a few more days. Once it's all polished down it should be a nice consistent colour over the whole car and will loo so much better for it. The elephant in the room is my bonnet, which is in a bad way. I had planned to simply replace it, but I've got steel and a welder here so depending on how long we're stuck at home it may end up getting fixed!
Anyway that would be hard work, so on a lighter note something else I've been toying with is wheel colour ideas. I'm not especially sold on the body colour wheels, and at the very least these particular wheels need repainting as they're really not a good colour match! So I've been toying with various ideas. My first thought was black, which I thought with the chrome hubcaps might look cool, but a photoshop wasn't promising. Playing about with photoshops I thought silver might actually be quite good, and I happened to have some silver wheel paint on the shelf, left over from the Spitfire, so I thought I'd try it...
.... mmm yeah. In this context it's not working for me at all. Back to the drawing board with that idea! I wonder if cream/old English white could work?
Last but certainly not least, I've been keeping a close eye online for engines and engine parts. I did bid on that engine that had been dug out of a hole in the ground. With 3 seconds to go I was winning at £62 with my max bid at £66. The auction finished at £66.61. Pipped at the post! Oh well, not a big loss. That engine could well have only been good for it's scrap metal value.
Back on eBay, I'd generally been filtering my searches by the condition 'used', to avoid having to trawl through hundred of new light bulbs and curse word that are listed under 'engines and engine parts'. This meant I'd somehow overlooked the handful of items listed under the condition of 'not working or for parts'. Ticking that box bought up just a couple of extra items, but one of them was a promising looking short block, at promising price. And so I bought it!
It will be arriving on a pallet next week. The description claims that it's sat for a long time but the bores have been greased and are in good condition. From the pictures I can see it's got +30 pistons in, so has obviously had work in the past. This isn't a bad thing, as it means the bores will have done less miles than if they were still standard size so less likely to be worn out. So if they're corrosion free they could well be good to go with just a light hone. The description also says that the seller has pulled the main bearing caps and that they look good, no pictures of this though... I've exchanged various messages with the seller who seems like a friendly reasonable guy and genuinely into his Daimlers, so hopefully his assertions about the engine will be true.
Worst case if the bores aren't great and need boring to the next oversize and the bearings all need replacing, the savings in the cost of welding my block justifies this purchase and hopefully this block will have other useful bits like an oil pump that's good enough to recondition. We shall see when it arrives I guess! Cross your fingers for me...
This boils down to two car related jobs basically, firstly to spend some more time sorting the paint (I've got painting supplies on the shelf in the shed) and secondly seat repair and recolouring (I've had a leather recolouring kit patiently waiting in the shed since Christmas).As the sun was shining, I started with the paint. Cast your mind back to early November when I was left no choice but to paint the doors in less than optimal conditions. The main downside of this was that the finish from the gun was terrible.
Thankfully I knew this might be the case and so made sure to put a good depth of clear coat on. This meant that at some time in the future (which happens to be now) I could wet sand the paint to get rid of the orange peel...
...and then compound and polish it to get a proper shine.
That's better! I don't own any fancy polishing tools or anything, so this will all be done by hand, I did say I'd got some spare time didn't I?
Anyway the previous pictures are all from testing one small section of the passengers rear door, time to scale this up to the whole car! Several hours later and the whole car was wet sanded, and generally looking a bit sorry for itself.
Those of you that have long memories may also remember that in November that I wasn't happy with the colour match on the doors. At the time I was worried that the 2nd batch of paint I'd had mixed up was the problem. The paint did settle in a bit as it fully dried, but I was never especially happy with it.
Wet sanding the whole car down gave me a sort of blank sheet to judge the colour matches by, without distraction of the differing surface finishes. What I could quite quickly was that the paint match issue wasn't with the 2nd batch of paint that I did the doors with, but the problem was with the 1st batch of paint that I did the engine bay, back edge of the front wings, sills, B posts and under the rear window with. I did try to take photos, but it all just looked red and it wasn't helpful, so words will have to suffice! It's weird how sometimes the camera hides these things and at other times it multiplies them.
With the now flat consistent surface, I could see a distinct colour change (slightly more pink/less brown) in the sections that I'd painted with that first batch of paint. I could also see that my 2nd batch of paint was actually a good match for the areas of the car that I haven't painted, such as the rear wings, boot lid and the front half of the front wings. As I've still got a reasonable amount of the 2nd batch of paint, and time and weather on my side, I decided yesterday to pause on the polishing and to instead blow over these problem areas, consisting of the back edge of the front wings, the sills, B posts and round the bottom of the rear window.
So yesterday afternoon I went back over the areas to be painted with a slightly coarser grit wet and dry paper to make sure I had a good key, then set about masking the car up.
Luckily I'd over bought masking tape and bought a roll of polythene dust sheet material when I was painting the living room, which made masking up easy. The polythene is great for masking off big areas I've got to say. Today dawned just as bright and warm, though a touch windier, but still it could be a lot worse, so I got stuck in.
Much better painting conditions, results in much better paint finish.
My main problem today was pollen coming off the trees, but I just made sure to wipe down the car between each coat of paint and in the warm the sun the paint was flashing off pretty fast so thankfully very little got stuck in the paint. With the masking removed it looks more mismatched than ever, but in real life you can see the colour is much more consistent, and I'm really pleased. A couple of days well spent I say.
I will have to wait a couple of weeks before I can polish the freshly painted bits, but I can still get on and polish up the rest of the paint in the mean time which will keep me busy for a few more days. Once it's all polished down it should be a nice consistent colour over the whole car and will loo so much better for it. The elephant in the room is my bonnet, which is in a bad way. I had planned to simply replace it, but I've got steel and a welder here so depending on how long we're stuck at home it may end up getting fixed!
Anyway that would be hard work, so on a lighter note something else I've been toying with is wheel colour ideas. I'm not especially sold on the body colour wheels, and at the very least these particular wheels need repainting as they're really not a good colour match! So I've been toying with various ideas. My first thought was black, which I thought with the chrome hubcaps might look cool, but a photoshop wasn't promising. Playing about with photoshops I thought silver might actually be quite good, and I happened to have some silver wheel paint on the shelf, left over from the Spitfire, so I thought I'd try it...
.... mmm yeah. In this context it's not working for me at all. Back to the drawing board with that idea! I wonder if cream/old English white could work?
Last but certainly not least, I've been keeping a close eye online for engines and engine parts. I did bid on that engine that had been dug out of a hole in the ground. With 3 seconds to go I was winning at £62 with my max bid at £66. The auction finished at £66.61. Pipped at the post! Oh well, not a big loss. That engine could well have only been good for it's scrap metal value.
Back on eBay, I'd generally been filtering my searches by the condition 'used', to avoid having to trawl through hundred of new light bulbs and curse word that are listed under 'engines and engine parts'. This meant I'd somehow overlooked the handful of items listed under the condition of 'not working or for parts'. Ticking that box bought up just a couple of extra items, but one of them was a promising looking short block, at promising price. And so I bought it!
It will be arriving on a pallet next week. The description claims that it's sat for a long time but the bores have been greased and are in good condition. From the pictures I can see it's got +30 pistons in, so has obviously had work in the past. This isn't a bad thing, as it means the bores will have done less miles than if they were still standard size so less likely to be worn out. So if they're corrosion free they could well be good to go with just a light hone. The description also says that the seller has pulled the main bearing caps and that they look good, no pictures of this though... I've exchanged various messages with the seller who seems like a friendly reasonable guy and genuinely into his Daimlers, so hopefully his assertions about the engine will be true.
Worst case if the bores aren't great and need boring to the next oversize and the bearings all need replacing, the savings in the cost of welding my block justifies this purchase and hopefully this block will have other useful bits like an oil pump that's good enough to recondition. We shall see when it arrives I guess! Cross your fingers for me...
