GTR Stagea Update. Lots of sanding.

So a fair bit has happened the past couple weeks. I started off by printing a new front fender as well. I decided it was going to save me time with the filler if I had a better starting shape so here are the two side by side getting glued together.

Now the only remaining printed parts from the first batch of printing are the sideskirt pieces and honestly, even those werent that great but I figured the sideskirts were going to be a lot of work regardless so I just didn't bother with them.

To glue the kit to the car I ended up going with regular construction adhesive. It didn't need to be anything crazy like the epoxy panel adhesives since these plugs only need to stay on long enough for me to make my moulds.

After letting the panels sit for a day I started adding expanding foam to the inside. The goal for this was to give the panels a little more support and also hold them in shape in case the heat from the bodyfiller or fiberglass made the parts want to warp.

Unfortunately the expanding foam ended up expanding a little too much after it formed a skin on itself and caused the door section of the rear flare to bulge out. There wasn't really any saving it so I had to just tear it off and print them again.

Leaving me with a pretty good sized pile of wasted prints

Once the new door section had printed off and I'd trimmed them and glued them together, I decided to add the expanding foam before fitting them to the car so that they wouldn't deform.

This approach worked a lot better. I was able to then just glue the new piece back onto the car and then it was all ready to start the filler.

You'll see the hole for the gas cap was filled in. I did this by just drilling holes into the filler cap area where I poured the foam in and it naturally came out as it expanded and filled in that recess. It was much quicker to get rid of it this way than to try and cleanly do it in CAD.

The shaping was really straight forward. There was no guess work and all I really had to do was just apply a few thin layers of filler all over the part and then just block sand it to get a really nice surface. The PLA doesn't really sand so the trick was to stop sanding as soon as you see the black plastic start to poke through.

Rather than try to completely finish the rear with all the bolt hole recesses and the gap for the door, I decided to leave it a single piece to make it easier to sand. If I added the holes and panel gaps then the sander would start chewing away at all these edges and so this lets me get the shape absolutely spot on before adding the details.

With the rear now ready for the first layer of primer, over the next few days I'll be working on the front fender and once that's done I'll finish off the side skirts. 

I've still got a good bit of work left to go before I'm going to jump back into posting videos, especially with extra work picking up on the side so I have to find the time to make a full mx5 widebody kit this week while finishing this off as well. But for now I'm pretty happy with the progress.

It's been really nice being able to work a bit more relaxed in the garage. Just sanding while listening to some podcasts and wearing jandals but soon it's back to working in silence with shoes and socks in the tail end of a kiwi summer.

Next update will most likely be right around when I start working on the videos so you should have a good idea of when these will start going up and as always I'll make an effort to get them up on Patreon a few days early with no ads.

Catch you all next time.