I did decide to join the small part of the tail section to the large part. The changes that I'm making affect both and the large section was getting too flimsy without the small part fastned to it. The small section had a U-shaped edge where it joined the large tail section which was about a quarter of an inch thick. The purpose of this edge is to give the piece ridgitity but I couldn't effectively join the two pieces together with that edge -- so I cut it off. However, by cutting off this edge it meant that I had up to a quarter inch step between the surface of the small tail section piece and the surface of the large piece. So I had to figure out a way of spacing the edge of the small piece of the tail section to the flange of the large piece. It also had to be flexible due to the curves in the pieces. I could have layed a bunch of bondo but it would have been messy and heavy. So, I turned to balsa wood and high strength epoxy.
I used cleco fasteners and to hold the pieces together and then pop rivetted them together and I again used the high strength adhesive to join the two pieces.
Since the two pieces were joined together, I could now cut out the hole on the left side. A big percentage of the tail is now missing!
Now it was time to go through the process of filling in the hole on the left side with the same procedure that I did on the right.
I then needed to lay some fiberglass over it and I chose to use some very light (4 lb) fiberglass cloth that could be layed and wetted out easily. I layed a piece over the foam and then traced it and cut it out. Once I had that template, I then used it to trace two more pieces of fiberglass so that I could put down three pieces of cloth.
In order to prevent the fiberglass resin from sticking to the foam, I put a very generous layer of mold release wax on the foam and removed any wax that I got on the bodywork with a wax/oil remover. Here is a pic of the foam with the wax on it.
I then layed the fiberglass and pryed the foam away from it. Here is a pic of the inside of the bodywork just after I seperated the foam from the newly hardened fiberglass. You can see that there is some foam around the edges which was intentional and actually turned out to be a great technique because it held the foam in place while I sanded it. There were some challenges working with the left side because of the foam moving around too much.
The left side came out really good but the fiberglass is a little flimsy so I will strengthen it with some fiberglass mat on the inside.
I went through the same fiberglassing process on the right side but after I was finished I found out I had a problem. I didn't have enough clearance. Dang it!! Here is a pic that shows where it was hitting.
I decided to make a smaller bubble and the blue lines in the picture show the size and shape of that bubble. I went through that process and I still had clearance issues!! So, this guess work was clearly not working. It was now Friday evening and I was tired -- it was time to get away from it for a little bit.
This morning I got up and took a look at the shape of the hole and I decided that the hole needed to be bigger and it was best to start over. I cut away what I had done and stuck the tail section back on the car.
I'm glad I did this because I also found out that the bodywork was also hitting a heat shield -- it is the flat piece of metal underneath the spark plug coils. So the hole needed to be even bigger -- and the black line shows the extra material that I needed to cut out. While sometimes doing a task multiple times is just part of the process, I definitely didn't wan't to do this one over again so I needed to figure out a way to work smarter and ensure that there was enough clearance between the bodywork and the engine after I fiberglassed over the bubble. So, I created a couple of templates out of cardboard so that I could use those when sculpting the foam.
The templates came in handy because after I pulled the cardboard from the foam, I found out that the bubble was not thick enough. I could have spread a bunch of bondo over the foam but the bad part about that is the bondo does not sand nearly as easily as the foam. More foam was the right choice but making a "bowl" was going to be very difficult so I decided to go with something totally different. I used a cheap brush to spread it over the existing foam before it really started to expand. I didn't have much time to spread it but it worked reasonably well. It did seem to create bigger air pockets in the foam but I found out that I could pack those with mold release wax. Here is a pic of the bubble ready to be fiberglassed -- and the fiberglass is drying as I type this. Hopefully there are no clearance issues tomorrow!!
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