Good evening all, has anybody stripped all the paint from a shell, Ian sugested a hot air gun which seems to remove the recent layers with ease but once I get beyond the the 1st three colour changes I encounter a silver primer this seems to be quite thick but there are no colours, the next thing I encounter is the glass shell, did the factory build up the shells with a filler primer?
I've removed many kilo's of paint from my Phase 1, in some areas it was close to 2mm thick. I counted some 11 or 12 layers of paint. I still have the roof to do. The way i did it was indeed with a hot air gun, and a slightly blunt chisel. You will have to find a balance in warming up the area you want to strip and the pressure you apply to the chisel. If you heat the area to much the GRP also becomes soft and the chisel will dig in. On my car the first layer of paint (on the bare GRP) was a grey filler primer. This was sometimes a bit hard to remove on curved areas, but what was left after chiselling is fairly easy to remove with a paint scraper and a little heat from the air gun. I've also tried to sand the paint off, but i found that this old paint gets soft due to warmth of the sanding, and the sanding paper lasted very short.
I had loads of problems with this, it's a hateful job.
My GRP had been waterlogged, so heating bolied the residual moisture and the steam delaminated the GRP. Chemical stripping with nitromors leached into the GRP. Sandpaper or Ali Oxide clogged almost immediately unless it was very coarse.
In the end I used a scothcbrite disk, run slowly in a drill. The paint came off in lumps, and it only started generating dust when you got back to base GRP. As far as I am aware there wasn't a gelcooat as such, I never found one, but mine is an early Phase 2 (Wincanton) body, Phase 1's and Warwicks may be different.
Then all you have to do is rebuild to get some sort of surface finish.
Hi Nigel, yea it's horrible, heat gun and chisel is the thing, oh and a good dose of blind stupidity!
The grey coat is a high build primer applied at the factory, I'm sure if we could look back through company records you would find they bought it from Wriggles the chewing gum manufactures.
With this coat removed you can do most of your repair work and then start to "seal it up"
Be very careful when sanding around the crest of the front wings, fins, petrol filler apertures, indicators etc as it is very easy to loose the shape/definition.
