I will apologize ahead for a long winded post about what visually looks like nothing has changed since last time. Such is the nature of body work when I am doing it.
So, about ten days have gone by and maybe 20 hours of labour...what have we accomplished?
Not much to look at I hate to say, but progress none the less. Suffice to say that without a shrinking disc, the thing would never be straight. Rust free, yes, but it would need a ton of filler or just never be perfect. If you do a lot of tin work on old cars, you need one of these
Recall this door, it looked pretty good at a glance, until I started to hit it with the guide coat and it eventually explained itself to me that it had 3 areas of high metal that kept poking up past the filler, and preventing me from getting a perfectly level panel. You can see a few spots where I have added filer in hopes that I could fair it out over the length of the door. I COULD have just called it good enough. I maybe SHOULD have called it good enough.
The culprit is the guy at the back. The 24" Durablock with 80 grit paper stuck on might as well be rebranded as "Your berkeleying Consience". If your work is not perfect, when you do a guide-coat sanding, it keeps telling you that you are not good enough to pass go. The red lines are either hammer marks from beating on the backside or sandblast damage as seen in the middle of the panel. EVENTUALLY, depending on how inexperienced and stubborn you are, you come to the sad conclusion that adding more filler is not the answer. You need to make the metal high spots go away. So off came all the filler near the high spots and out comes the shrinking disc and start over pretty much from scratch.
The circles are where I had to strip filler off and hit the panel with the disc. Amazing tool and quite controllable. Just run it over the high spot and friction will heat up the metal. Then hit the spot with a wet rag and it shrinks the high spot down. I started with the middle and then kept going around the ring areas that kept being exposed as the new high spots. The area near the door handle was hammer marks from beating out an oil-can. Oil cans are a story in themselves; I have come a long way in the understanding of oil-can psychology. That is going to come in handy in the near future...
My hope is that this is going to be the last coat of mud on this door.
Enough of the bad stuff, lets look at the wins...these are all taken after scuffing off a guide-coat of paint to make sure the panels are flat.
PS rear quarter is ready for high fill. The B post right behind the door took a lot of massaging with the shrinking disc before it would conform.
The PS front fender was not a big deal. You can see the layers it took to get it smooth. You can also see the CROWN about halfway down the fender that defines how much mud I could sand off. It JUST worked out as is and you cant feel a "Hump" or transition as you run your hand over the panel. If the transition had been detectable, it would have been another job for the shrinking disc. A guide coat is confirmation that the job is done well and/or information on what needs to be fixed, but your hand will always let you know if it is not right, it does not take a special feel.
The nose is looking good. Not much more than a 1/16" of filler, but it makes all the difference in the world. This probably could have been done with the high-fill primer but I like to get the tin as smooth as possible with filler and do less spraying. The hood is just sitting in the hole at the moment, I still need to bolt it to the hinges and custom fit it to the rest of the car. Sure that will entail some kind of fun that I am not yet aware of!
Not to go unmentioned is the area inside of the grill. One of the Pete-Minions has dedicated about six Sundays of his life to fabricating, welding, grinding and smoothing out this cavity so that it looks like factory. When it comes to places where Miata-meets-Volvo, and you want the scar to be undetectable, this was a fun area. Lots going on.
The DS front fender was without any major drama. Note the area where the side-marker was removed; that is a fun little piece of geometry to sand smooth. Note that where there is a panel gap, it is tempting to just level across with filler and sand it smooth. Not a good idea as filler will chip. Unless you are doing this to sell the car, you want the edges of the panel to be metal high spots when you are done.
The DS rear quarter is also in the "Done" column. The bit of guide coat on the front is over-spray from working on the door.
In the work to be done column, I have the PS door. After removing it and e-wheeling it and re-installing it, I was real close and should have quit, but then I did this thing with the shrinking disc. Did I mention that the disc has a learning curve? I quit working on it last week when this happened cause I did not want to start throwing stuff, and have not gone back because I cant get to the back of the panel. I have a plan...
And the final frontier...The roof? I There are half a dozen oil-cans/depressions that are going to have to come out of this panel. The disc lessons I have learned will come in handy and I am glad I practiced on the doors first.
The truth is that I could have just smeared the entire roof panel in filler, and nobody would ever know. But where is the beer drinking, tool buying, opportunity in that?
So, assuming you have not all given up in this novel of a post, lets talk about what happens AFTER all the mud is in place....
In the normal course of events, I would spray the car in an epoxy, then shoot feather fill polyester filler,sand/sculpt that until I felt life was not worth living, and finish with a sealer coat obsessively sanded to 600 grit before paint.
But I got talked into this product. It is a "hybrid epoxy" whatever that means. What it means practically is that depending on how you mix it ( reduced or non reduced) it is either an epoxy sealer or a sandable high-build. So, what I am going to try and do is get away without using the gallon of feather fill that I already bought. Or maybe just use it in a few places? I don't know yet?!
Stuff I have learned,
Feather fill comes in two flavours. The traditional one that I bought ( same as I have used in the past) demands that you must not have any bare metal exposed when you spray this stuff on. So all those spots that get exposed during filler work need to be epoxy primed. In my case, pretty much the entire car.
What I should have specified is this product: Evercoat Feather fill 4:1. ( DTM or "Direct to Metal")
It can be shot over bare metal and actually builds a thicker film than the G2 version. I have worked with Feather fill before and love the stuff, but if I have done a good enough job with the body fill and I have to shoot the entire car in a high-build epoxy anyway, maybe I wont need it? Well see.
As so as you can see, even though it looks like nothing has happened for the last couple of weeks, its chugging along.
Another lesson I am learning is that if you don't do enough of this bodywork stuff, you wont ever get comfortable with it. The skill development gets rusty and the material in the market change too fast. Your supplier might be a good resource, but they are not tailored for the occasional painter.