After a morning of clay bashing with Katie in the bright sunshine, the rising temperatures gave me some hope that my plan of chucking the new paint at the mini engine bay would meet with success. So I masked off the rest of the car, degreased,and tack ragged the engine bay. Then I attacked it with some of that denim blue paint I showed you last time.
This is what it now looks like.
Now normally after spraying a metallic basecoat, you topcoat it with clear lacquer. So what the bloomin eck, is that primer doing on top of the nice shiney new blue paint.
Well it seems that some of the POR15 reacted with the base coat to turn it a nasty crinkly texture.
It’s very odd as the whole of the engine bay is coated in the stuff, and only a couple of patches reacted. Of course these were the tops of the wings which are the most the most visible part of the engine bay. It is all well over two weeks old and fully cured, and I followed the directions to the letter before topcoating it so I’was more than a little miffed.
So I had to attack it all with air n a powered wire brush and took it all the way back to the original primer. Then re-coated it with new etch primer . This solved the problem, for all the major areas. Even so, there are one or two more areas which re crinkled back again like the one above on the top of radiator shroud. So I’m going to have to attack this again tomorrow, and then re etch prime. If I then leave it all a few days to go off properly I’ll chuck some more base coat at it next weekend. Then once that has gone hard I can start refitting the front subframe and running gear (at last). Still here’s a pic of the front half of the engine bay which looks a whole lot better. This little escapade has certainly convinced me that while I’m happy to spray the Sabre, for the external surfaces of Kate’s road car a professional job is required.
