33_coupe_paint33

After installing the deck lid, I attached my gas-springs to my purple anodized brackets which are clamped onto my roll cage down bars. These gas-springs are rated at 30 lbs. each which is just enough to open the deck lid all the way from the position there're mounted at. I have some 15 lbs. gas-springs that I tried but they weren't strong enough. If I moved the clamps that they're mounted to down farther on the roll cage, the softer ones seemed to work but they were a little too long when mounted there. The 30 pound ones were way too stiff mounted low so this is why you see them where they are now.

After bolting on the striker to the deck lid and adjusting everything, the trunk lid was working great. When I pushed the button on my remote, the lid opened nice and smooth, just like I wanted. But now I had another problem to deal with. Seems that the gas-springs want to buckle the deck lid a small amount so the body lines don't line-up anymore.

As you can see here, the deck lid doesn't close all the way because of the force of the gas-springs pushing up on it. There're mounted (the top mounts for the gas springs) about in the middle of the deck lid, which is the spot that sticks up the highest. I didn't notice this awhile back before the body was painted so this will have to be fixed. I can't have too many more things go wrong at this point because the car is almost finished.......right?? Geezz!!

I guess this means I'll be eliminating the gas-springs all together and coming up with another way to keep the deck lid open. I have an idea of what might work this time but I'm going to have to make it so stay tuned to see how that turns out.

Onto a different area of the car for a minute. Remember the Dzus fastener plates that were also starting to rust? Well they were in the box of things to be chromed as well. As you can see, I've reinstalled the springs that I removed before they went to be chromed. I used some small washers on the back of the rivets to help keep the springs on. For now, I'm going to be keeping these off the car so it's easier to buff the paint for the last time once the graphics have been redone. To reattach them to the car, I'm going to use pop-rivets again because they seemed to work great the first time.

There's not much to keep me busy right now but next week, if all the planets lineup, I'll be taking the car back over to have the graphics redone. I've talked to Rob (the graphics guy) about what I want to do and this time I'm going to be making some test panels of the colors that I want to go with. This way, if they don't look good on the test panel, it's easy to try something else till I'm happy and "then" he can apply some new paint.

Speaking of paint, I'm spraying undercoating on the running boards and rear fenders. I masked off all the polished bolts that hold the panels on because removing them now after there're all lined up would be a pain.

The undercoat is made by Keystone and is called "California VOC Paintable Undercoating". The color of the undercoating is black, but like the name says, you can paint over it any color that you want. I'm going to leave it black though because if I want or need to touch it up someday, it will be very easy.

What I've done is masked off the area that needs to be painted and then I can get busy. I took this picture before I was through masking things off so you could see the small area that I had to work in. After I took the picture, I continued to mask off the whole area before I did any painting. Now this stuff smells terrible and it gags you big time once your inside that small area spraying paint. I wore a mask to paint with but after a few minutes of breathing this stuff, I wasn't feeling too well. It took me about three to four hours of clean fresh air to feel normal again. I would have opened the big door but the wind was blowing 30 to 40 mph that day and it would have blown the paper off so I had to make do with just my three garage windows being open.

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