grp bodywork

[benzo]

hi.

I have a damaged rear wing on my kit car. The rear wing is gel coated glass fibre. I need to fill this damage with what i guess is isopon? Equally there are little tiny spider holes in the front swept wings. Do i fill these with isopon as well?

I think there are two grades of isopon, which do i use?

Also, DIY painting. I bought 5 spray cans of red paint and painted the nose on the kit car. I tried my best and avoided runs etc but the end result was cack. Can i hire a proffessional spray gun and paint. Would my results be any better than with the spray cans?

any help appreciated!

[steve_d]

Sound like you are as good at this spraying lark as I am.
Being old and wise I gave up trying to spray a long while ago. Get it done by a professional.

The GF repair is not as simple as throwing on some filler. The star cracks in the gelcoat have come from damage to the base GF and all of the gel coat will need to be removed out to the ends of the cracks or they will just continue to crack and crack through your new paint finish. If you're going to get it sprayed then find someone who knows GF and they will be better placed to do the repairs.

Not quite the spirit of DIY and kit building but the job will be better for it.

Steve

[ELAN+2]

the techniques for repairing GRP are fairly straight forward, just very messy, for gel coat cracks, grind away the gel coatfor a couple of inches around the crack, apply resin, then before it fully cures apply a layer of fibre glass tissue, then saturate this with resin and allow to cure.When set rub back with a coarse abrassive (dry) around 120 grit should do it then apply a decent body filler. I use UPOL Easy Sand and then UPOL Top Stop as a fine finish.

Splits and Tears need to be braced, I used alloy strips behind the crack held in place by self tappers, you then grind around 2/3rds of the way through the panel along the tear/splitand feather this out around an inch or so each side.Saturate the area with resin and apply layers of glass fibre mat, saturating each layer to build up the thickness to just below the surrounding body work. Remove the braces and refit over the newly repaired area and repeat the above process to the rear of the panel as well. To finish off I use the tissue and filler method. There are some pics of the processes here,: www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=47&t=319107


Mark

[Stu R]

drill a very small hole right at the end of the crack, stops it spreading.

Then just do what the man above said