McArlus Cars - 9

A rather significant step has taken place over the last few weeks.

The chassis has been stripped and painted!

This means that a large part of the remaining work is assembly and attention to details. There are a few other outstanding items, such as finalizing wiring and the radiator system and the body work, but basically all of the major construction is done!

The chassis is a nightmare to paint!

After procrastinating for ages I finally decided to build a rotisserie, for this job at least it was a godsend and in reality not that hard to make.

Painting though is a different story! There are so many tubes at so many angles that it is a nightmare to paint each one on four sides. It is also surprisingly difficult to reach “inside” the space frame in order to paint the inner parts, I now have a couple of windcheaters that have grey paint all up the arms!

From start to finish, including cleaning up, each coat took around 2 ½ hours to do.

After one undercoat and three top coats I gave up. At this stage I still had the rollbar to do. I decided that I would probably never get a perfect cover on the whole car, as it was getting increasing difficult to see what was and wasn’t painted with each coat, so it would have to do.

Although I can still find spots that have a small run or other areas that have that have that rough feel of overspray where I have missed a small section on the final coat over all I’m really pleased with the end result. Certainly the finish is good “race car quality” if not Pebble Beach Concours!

I’ll start putting things together over the next week so it should soon really look like a real car!

Can’t wait to clear all of the pieces out of the garage!

Regards

Simon

Simon's comment today was "it's downhill from here". I think I know what he means.

Anyway, I'm looking at all that barwork and thinking how basic my Ikara space frame is by comparison. On Rick's advice I've been contemplating some extra bits of tubing in certain places that need it. Andrew, my son, has been questioning the need. I think I'll  show him these pictures.