Day 160

Work is going to really start picking up these next few weeks and I'll have little time to work on the car.  BUT, in between work and rest I will be able to get some small projects done.

Today I did some media blasting to get the bumper spacers and new bumper support tubes I bought all clean.  They need to be epoxy primed and then painted black.  I have a couple other items that need to be painted black as well.

The big project today was designing and building a fender support system.  One of the issues I had with painting the small parts is either overspray on a 2nd coat on the backside of a part or it was sticking to the paper if I tried to do both sides.  It was kind of messy when I did primer and better with the small parts.  But for the stuff people are going to actually look at I need to make sure my system works.

This is for the rears and each fender will be on opposite sides of the vertical board. above and below each other.

The fenders are also very awkward and I needed a solid support so that they didn't sway with the air pressure of my paint gun.

So, I came up with a system that takes a 2x4 and runs down from an overhead piece of wood that is part of my paint booth.  I re-used some old parts of my dolly when I cut it down a bit as feet and got it all put together.  I then supported the fenders with one through bolt and a horizontal arm with two more support bolts.

This setup should allow me to spray paint on both sides at once.  I'm going to try it with the primer filler and see how well it works.  If it's difficult to get to all the nooks and crannies I can still mask off areas I don't want painted and do each side one at a time.

Another positive is that because I will be spraying a metallic paint the parts need to be sprayed in the orientation that they will be on the car.  That is because the tiny metal flakes in the paint will flow with gravity and if not painted the way it would be on the car (like the rest of the car is painted) it will be noticeable.

We'll see how it works!