When building your own T-Bucket, paint application can be kind of scary. If you do it yourself, it might be a learning experience that produces a good “ten foot paint job”. But if you have the budget and you really want eyes to pop up close then it might be worth following what Dave Melling did in his T-Bucket paint application. He left it to the professionals.
Having completed the building work concerning the body, I was able to completely strip the body of its’ fittings and set about improving the finish of the fiberglass.
On the underside of the body, the fiberglass resin had been allowed to set quite roughly, so I filled in some of the ripples with plastic padding [body filler] and sanded it down, as you can see in the photographs.
I decided to leave the filling and smoothing of the bodywork to the people who were doing the T-Bucket paint application, namely Essex Stove Enamelling, of Sutton Road, Southend. The body was to be painted in two-pack [catalyzed] enamel, which would give the car a nice deep shine, without all the effort that is associated with using cellulose laquer, namely rubbing down between umpteen coats. The colour I chose was Signal Red [a cherry shade], as use by the Post Office!
I took the body in to be painted and left it with them. I found out that it took them at least three goes to get a result with which they were happy. Apparently, every time it was placed in the oven and warmed-up to set the paint off, air bubbles trapped in the fiberglass would expand and cause the paint to blister from the inside out. One of the problems associated with using two-pack paint is that you cannot ‘blow over’ patches which are less than satisfactory. You have to rub down the whole lot and do it again.
Here we see the results of the many hours spent on the bodywork.
The smoothness and shine of the paint can be seen in these few photos.
The inside of the car had been painted light grey to tidy it up and make it more pleasant to work in.
The chassis and mudguards were also sprayed the same colour by the same people, as will be seen in later photos.
Let the beauty of Dave Melling’s T-Bucket paint application soak in because in our next installment we’ll go from eye-pleasing beauty to mind-boggling confusion for many: T-Bucket wiring.
TBucketPlans.com originated in 2005 as a personal blog extolling the virtues of T-Buckets. In 2009 I blogged about Chester Greenhalgh, the "how to" genius who wrote the legendary, out-of-print “How to Build a T-Bucket Roadster for Under $3000”. That led to a friendship with Chester and our partnership in marketing the updated eBook version of his T-Bucket building bible. The T-Bucket fire burns stronger and stronger.
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