Lotus Europa Community
Lotus Europa Forums => Garage => Topic started by: digby on Friday,October 04, 2013, 04:40:16 AM
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I was watching "Wheeler Dealers" the UK equivalent of "Overhaulin" but a much much lower budget given the amount of money they must have spent on the Europa. They were restoring a Corvette Stingray. The guy doing the paint job used carbon fiber filler on the boot lid to cover cracks in the gell coat. He only seemed to grind off the paint then cover it with the filler, it clearly had carbon strands in the filler which would improve the strength over normal filler.
I was wondering if anybody had experience of this method of repair as it did look quick but I don't know if it would last?
Richard
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Richard,
one of my offspring owns a boat /RV business that only deals in fiberglass repair. This includes high h.p, 100 + mph river and off shore boats. I'll ask him, but I will write that he and I still use glass cloth on all the Loti (the herd) body repairs.
And still my favorite is multi directional cloth for strength. I still use plastic body filler with a dash of extra resin for finishing work. It doesn't make me right, but it has worked for a long time.
mike
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Hi Richard,
I didn't see the episode you mention, but I did watch them do the Elan a few years ago and on that they ground away and seemed to coat it with body filler. It looked great out of the paint shop but I did wonder how long it lasted. I'm afraid I'm old school on this, if I have to take out gel coat cracks I grind away quite a large area into the matting and then build it back up with resin and surfacing tissue. I do use filler, but not so much and mainly for air bubbles that magically appear once I think I've finished.
The place I buy my resin from also sells different grades of filler materials, from the basic powder to different lengths and types of fibre so you can mix your own custom body fillers. It's no cheaper than buying ready-mixed but you do have the option of making it a bit smoother with more resin, which I prefer for filling small defects. Anyway, they sell a short fibre filler for when you need to make a fillet or radius and you need more strength than conventional powder fillers, so if the idea appeals to you, you don't have to stick at carbon fibres. (I'm not convinced the carbon fibre adds anything to this type of application other than expense ! )
Brian
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I saw the episode and I was curious about this as well.
This is the filler that they are using: http://www.u-pol.co.uk/product-cat/109/smc%E2%84%A2-application-specific-high-adhesion-easy-sand-fibre-filler.htm
It's U-pol SMC filler.
I think it's a solution that's better than filling all of the cracks with polyester filler (bondo), but I don't think it will last as well as actually sanding/grinding out all of the cracks and properly repairing them. With the filler there isn't any actual fibreglass bonding between the surface I think. It might be something to use over your fibreglass repairs, but not the product to do all of the repairs with.
But I would like to know if anyone has any experience with this sort of product.
Kind regards,
Serge
http://sleurs-motorsport.com/
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I have no knowledge of this product either, but carbon fibers, being much stronger than glass, it does seem "theoretically" feasible. But I too, trust the old school way of repairing cracks, but my next thought is; if all that's needed is removing the paint, how do you get everything flush without removing fibers that span the crack?
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I took good note of wheeler dealers on that. I would say however that for that repair you need to take the gel coat back to the fibreglass then build up with this filler. The old school method is to take off the gel coat and use fine tissue fibreglass resined on then filler to finish. Is this new filler better than tissuing the body? It might well be? Would be good to get some evidence.
I am at the moment taking the hell coat back and tissuing but was thinking of is this stuff worth looking at
Some tissuing up done on the wing top