Fault Found

It's a long time ago dear reader, but do you remember I had a problem with the Fury's alternator not charging on day 2 of the road trip?

Think I've found the cause.

When I built the car with the beloved Crossflow, I followed the wiring diagram for the FIA kill switch & ran the coil wire through one set of the FIA switch terminals. When the zetec went in, that wire was redundant, so I capped & stowed it. Then the Denso alternator needed a switched live so - presto - here's just the thing!

I've just taken the pod off & it looks like there's water marks on the switch case, so I'm guessing there's corroded terminals inside. If I'd remembered that wire went through the cut-off & thought to cycle the switch a few times I may have cured the fault!

There's a new switch on the way to be on the safe side.

The Body Beautiful

Beautiful ish.

Sort of beautiful with an interesting mole, or a pierced lip maybe?

Yes I've been working on the headlight socket repair again - & I've met with some success! When we saw it last, it was all lumpy, but yellow at least. I'd rubbed it down & got it smooth at least, but the underlying colour was showing & I'd realised that using the heat gun to cure it was darkening the pigment.

So, today I took the Dremel & cut out the dark areas as well as some cracking in the gel-coat that had shown up after the sanding. Then I made up some more goop & blobbed it in. Realising I could kill two birds with one stone I took the Dremel to the cold air intake & ground out the edges so the GRP could be covered up. This also meant grinding a large lump out of the leading edge "ramp" which had cracked anyway.

The goop was staying resolutely liquid as I attempted to get it to stay in the ground out areas, while at the same time building up the deeper / lower bits. Then after about 1/2 hour there was a noticeable increase in the viscosity of the goop in the tray. I quickly checked for any low areas & added some where it was needed - then suddenly it was solid! - perfect.

After tea, I rubbed down the light socket & the intake. The intake needs a little more work as it's still a little lumpy & the dark GRP is showing through at the sides. On the upside, the intake is a much better shape than it was before (either time) & with a little more work will look good.

Good enough for me at least & when it comes to bodywork, I'm not very picky.

As I said it need a little more work next time I make up some goop & it needs a bit more smoothing both on the bottom ramp & at the sides.

But the point of the exercise was the headlight, & as you can see, it's not half bad for an amateur.

There's a little staining in the colour, but the car's usually dirty enough to hide that. It also need some polishing.

I've polished it a bit, but it's not as glossy as the rest of the area yet - some more to do tomorrow I think.

But certainly when you stand back from it, it doesn't shout "REPAIRED" at you .........
....does it?

Winging It ......

...... in SO many ways.
Firstly the working abroad is going well - thanks for asking - but flying out on a Monday morning & back on Thursday night is taxing when you're in your 50s. Feels odd to be doing proper aircraft design again after faffing with minor mods dressed up to look like something important.

Next, is the repair to the Fury's front wing after I dropped it on the concrete drive. The wounds to my elbow & knees have almost healed - not so the bonnet, so - on to the repair. I had no idea how to go about this so the third use of the title refers to my repair attempts.

This is the sorry state of affairs when I began:-

That's a great chunk of gelcoat missing altogether & some deep scratches around it I think the worst was taken by the winker lens which shattered, & the lamp cover which was tough enough to

withstand the impact. So, first job, fill the hole. Fortunately I had some surfacing fibreglass - almost like cotton wool, so I cut a couple of pieces of that to rough shape, made up some resin mix & daubed it in. Not having measured the quantities it was reluctant to cure, so a little more hardener was added & the new mix daubed on, then as usual the hot-air paint stripper was called into play & it went off in next to no time.
Then I smoothed it off with coarse, then fine, then wet wet&dry, so it looked like this:-       

The profile was pretty good at this point, so out came the Dremel & I ground the main damaged area down & used a ball ended cutter to cut a groove where the cracks in the gelcoat were, so in theory all the damaged area was a little lower than the good surface & as rough as a rough thing to give a good key.

So I then made up some yellow goop - no science here either, just a dollop of yellow gelcoat, a glug of GRP resin & a splash of hardener. This was again daubed on, the heat gun used to skin it over, then more goop added in the low areas & repeat until satisfied. It's now curing off in the sun before I attack it with the wet&dry again. Maybe it'll work nicely, maybe not, but it'll look better than it did before & if next time you see the car it has inch wide black edging to the headlamp covers, you'll know why.