Repair and Prep for Anglesey

After my little off at Cadwell i needed to do a bit of fibre glassing and wanted top give the car a good check over.

First off i removed the bodywork and gave the car good check over, tightening/testing all bolts and checking pipework and wires. There wasn't much to report apart from the front wheel bearings had a small amount of play in them, so i gave both hub bolts a tweek which removed it. 4 or 5 of the under tray bolt heads had been ground down from where i had gone over the curb a couple of times at Park bend so i removed them with pliers and replaced with some nice new fresh bolts. I checked the prop shaft bolts again for tighteness which where fine, but noticed that the gear selector arm had come loose on the spline again. This seems to be happening all the time, but doesn't seem to be a bolt coming loose, i need to keep my eye on this as its a potential race wrecker! I also decided to swap the rear body work pins over as they were wearing away on the top edge and could lead to the body dropping if the wore through during a race.

The bonnet needed repairing as it had snapped at the top of the wheel arch. This was easy enough, i just left the tape on from my trackside repair and laid 2 layers of 450g CSM over the crack. Once cured i removed the tape and rubbed it down. I hate rubbing down and always wanted an orbital sander, so when i spotted one on special in B&Q i snapped it up. It made the rubbing down and filling easy and almost fun!!! The bonnet is in a bit of a state after numerous repairs, but i tried to make as good a job as possible as i plan on a full respray this winter. I have managed to get hold of an accident damaged lemans front end off a nice lady on www.loscostbuilders.co.uk, i just need to to organise going to fetch it. After the rubbing down i applied some plastic primer and needed to source a top coat. Prior to buying the car, David had found a fairly close match for the yellow at Halfords from a Daewoo Tico, unfortunately Halfords wouldn't make this up for me as it was lead based! A very helpful lad spent half an hour with me going through all the colour palettes until we found what looked like a good match and mixed me up 2 cans. The match once on the car isn't very good, probably no worse than the Daewoo colour, but again different, so i now have nice 3 tone body work.