Saturday 11th December 2004

Bodywork inspection & polish

Before we can get the car all dressed up in a Norseperformance livery, for the full race look, and to give our sponsors some return on their investment, we needed to properly go over the outside of the car and decide what paintwork was good, and what needed attention. Whilst the car looks quite shiny in pictures, the black paintwork has gone pale in some areas - the bumpers particularly, and there are a couple of areas of rust in obvious places which would need attention.

The first task of the day was to give the car a good wash and leather off. The car started first time without the aid of a booster pack - we were pleased that our efforts in removing the alarm/immobiliser had not been in vain. Sadly, it was a particularly frosty morning, the car was covered in frost and the hosepipe had frozen solid. Buckets of hot water made this job a little more pleasant, but not greatly so. At least it was sunny!

To polish the paintwork, we used a high speed rotary polisher with a foam/rubber pad and T-cut 2K cutting polish. Using a high speed polisher vastly speeds up the polishing process, and creates a good finish, but some skill is required not to burn through any corners of paintwork or high spots. We have used them before, so we were confident, but care was still needed. The bodywork wasn't scratched, but had just gone dull, so T-cut 2K which has quite a gentle cut seemed to work well, just leaving the smaller detail areas to be done by hand.

Once completed, we hand polished the whole car using a low silicone polish to protect the bodywork. (Using a high silicone polish would have caused problems when trying to stick the graphics on).

With the job completed, we were pleased to have only a short list of bodywork to attend to:

· The bonnet has been re-painted badly, and has small cracks all over it - this will need re-painting
· There is a small area of rust on the Near side A pillar - this probably extends under the windscreen rubber, but we will simply flat it back and paint it without removing the windscreen
· There are some minor dents on the OSF wing. These can probably be made less obvious by knocking the out from under the wing.

Pleased with our efforts and admiring the shiny black Carlsson in the midday sunlight we finished early for the day (well, there is no interior to clean on this car!)

Photos of the bodywork