How do I get my panels to not be straight?

General Discussion. Make yourself at home...read, ask and answer!

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2021 11:15 am
NFT5 wrote:For curved panels I'm very interested on the new acrylic blocks (with the slotted tube on the back). Come in various lengths and stiffnesses and, if you believe the advertising hype, will flatten panels beyond what any other block can do.

Have a job coming up in a few months that would be ideal and intend to buy some. Bit exxy, though.


Make your own, i been doing this for years
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2021 5:28 pm
PainterDave wrote:Make your own, i been doing this for years


One (good) solution and yes, I've done this too. What I like about the acrylic blocks is that the stiffness of the base would result in a smoother curve.....I think. Plus they take out those small low spots that the Durablocks don't.
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 30, 2021 10:18 pm
Well, I believe I finally have achieved a result I can be proud of. Photos following, starting from black epoxy all of the way through to the final spray of clearcoat in Wimbledon White.

The acrylic sanding block was ok but not great for these fenders as they have some real crowns on them. I only saw one grade of flex when I bought mine and I wasn't about to buy another. So I ended up ditching it as it was hitting metal.

What I found worked really nice was to take the 11" Durablock and just go gently in a cross-hatch pattern, taking special care not to chase any low spots out. I just let the sandpaper do the work and didn't press too hard. I filled the low spots and kept at it.

When I thought I had it, I sprayed high fill primer and repeated. The second time, things were almost straight but not quite. So I repeated a third time. I still had a little filler to apply at this point but decided to call it quits and spray a sealer coat.

This took a LOT longer than I expected... about six part-time days for both fenders.

Almost forgot, I had to mount the fenders and line things up before applying the first round of filler. This included some careful work getting the gaps even.

Epoxy:

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After first fill, still mounted:

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Door gap worked out. I actually thought I was close to done here.

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The fenders had other plans for me. This one had received a few bumps in the 13 years I had her, but bringing it down to metal revealed that it had far more than I expected. This took a lot of minor bump and fill to get evened out.

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I didn't take any photos of primer but it was pretty clear at this point that the end result was going to be a light year ahead of my earlier panels. There was not a ripple or bump to be found anywhere, even with a bright LED flashlight held just over the surface.

After clearcoat (no cut and buff yet). No runs anywhere.

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Pretty happy with this. Definitely a show finish :-)

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 31, 2021 8:30 am
And see....you thought you needed special tools/equpment to do that....what it really took was "TIME"....... 8)
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 31, 2021 12:23 pm
:goodjob:
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 01, 2021 6:53 pm
Yep, well done. :goodjob:
Chris

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PostPosted: Mon Nov 01, 2021 9:19 pm
I particularly like the uniform door gaps.

They're sometimes hard to get right,
and very important on a light-colored car.
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 02, 2021 5:32 pm
Thanks, everyone. Couldn't have done it without this forum.

However... I called victory too soon. I ended up with a couple of serious flaws on my fenders and I'm trying to figure out how to fix them without a complete respray.

Here's the first - I went through the metal on a high spot, right where the rear fender meets the top of the passenger side door. This one is really visible.

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The other one is visible from the rear... a hard to reach spot where I simply didn't hit it with enough color.

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Now I had some minor things I was able to fix which gives me some hope. Specifically, I ended up with some small fibers underneath the clear on both fenders. I fixed these by scraping the top of each with a sharp x-acto blade, covering with a little base and sanding flat. I had a couple of larger ones that I even brushed a little clear over the top and they are nearly invisible.

So I wonder if it's possible to spot repair these?



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PostPosted: Tue Nov 02, 2021 6:00 pm
BTW, those fenders are looking mighty straight and shiny. Really happy overall with how this has turned out.

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 03, 2021 2:44 am
Only you can see it Ot.

The rest of us think it's brilliant
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