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"Stupid bubbles..."
This was it, the first big bodywork orientated kind of job...
The chosen colour scheme for the car is orange and carbon fibre. This means wrapping the side panels in a 5d carbon fibre vinyl wrap. Neither of us have really wrapped anything before (other than Kathryn doing her bike frame in some clear wrap a while back)
The first job was to get the pesky laser film off the panels. This is no mean feat... A combination of a hairdryer, panel wipe, a plastic scraper and a lot of elbow grease got us there in the end!
I'm glad we aren't planning on leaving the aluminium bare as it marks really easily!
We had decided to wrap the panels before sticking them onto the car. So into the warm kitchen we go!
We made the decision to wrap inside the engine bay to make it look neat in there too. We wrapped the inside of the panels and then scalpeled off the bits where it would glue onto the chassis.
The wrapping operation! We decided to do them dry as getting water out from underneath seemed like too much to ask. We still struggled with bubbles on the bends but it was far easier than if we put it on wet.
Before sticking the panels on the car, we decided to install the edge trim to the openings where the wishbones etc. come through the panel. There was a concern that once the panels were glued on, it might make doing the edge trim a bit tricky.
Some superglue and a considerable amount of patience (swearing) later (internal corners are not easy with trim). They were on and we deemed the panels pretty much ready to install!
It was tricky enough without the wishbones poking through so we were glad to have done it when we did.
We had been saving a load of panels up to glue at the same time, problem is, once you open the PU glue, you only have a few days until the plunger in the back glues itself to the tube and you can't get glue out any more!
Once again we masked up the back of the brake lines/pipes to stop them being accidentally glued to anything, then a quick wipe round with IPA prior to sticking the glue on and you're good to go.
We just used the same Alpha 123 PU adhesive that GBS use. Certainly seems to do the trick.
There are rivets on the bottom of the side panel at the front end which nicely holds the front on, but there's nothing at the back and no way of using clamps, so we reckoned a load of masking tape would hold it and fortunately we were right.
We were hovering around 10-12 degrees air temperature when we did it, so we were probably looking at a 48 hour cure time. We had to wait between side panels as we didn't have enough clamps. If you bought 20 clamps instead of our 10, you could probably do both side panels at the same time but having missed the amazon man cut off time for the weekend it was going to be a 2 day job.
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