Thursday 16 February 2012

Not happy ...

Been a while since my last report, mainly because I lost motivation a bit. And this is caused by the fact that my daily work has taken too much of my energy, so I am at home for the time being to recover a bit ...


Over the past month or so I returned to the DHC a few times to do some more dismantling. Why should that be?, I can hear you ask. Well early in the year I brought the car away for paint repairs and it turned out that the front spoiler was beyond (economical) repair. That wasn’t too bad as I do have two spare spoilers left. After that we found some more accident damage where the rear of the right hand door hit the B-pillar when I hit the stone during the 10CR ...


This meant more than half of the car needed a re-spray. And that was when we discovered that the paint had developed (severe) discolouration at several locations on the car. Worst hit are the driver’s door ...



The inside of the bonnet ...


And the rear of the front panel ...


First thought was that this was caused by the chemicals used for removing the paint (and hadn’t been removed properly from the seams) which than reacted with the paint. And that still is my main thought for the door and bonnet, especially as the right hand door, which received a new door skin after the chemical paint removal, doesn’t have any signs of this discolouration. The other strange thing is that it’s taken two years to show itself?
But we also found a few places that can’t have been caused by the paint removal chemicals. The rear panel near the fuel filler cap ...



The damage is worst on the driver’s door, and rectifying that will be very time-consuming, with no guarantee that the problem will be cured. So we decided to use one of my spare door skins and a second hand door from the shed to make a new one ...


As it stands at the moment both the paint removal company (Giessen/Mitraco) and the paint manufacturer (Sikkens) are pointing at each other. So not much to expect from them I am afraid. Although the general consensus is that the discolouration is caused by some sort of moisture that penetrated the paint from the inside and has reacted with the aluminium particles in the paint. But we are not going to wait till they have agreed on something, which they are not even trying. So we decided for a full re-spray of the car’s exterior. But we’ll be using a different kind of paint, which Sikkens has promised to supply.

Needless to say this will be continued ...

2 comments:

Patrick said...

Hello Beans',

Hard GREAT work but sadness about the result of paint work done out of your own garage !
do you think that discolouration will be not visible with a new paint in dark colour ? Because I think about a futur yellow color for my TR7 or total black mat.
best regards Patrick

Beans said...

Problem (according to the paint manufacturer) is caused by moisture or fluids that one way or another have reacted with the metallic flakes in the paint. Seems that this is a rather common problem with lighter waterbased colours.
Needles to say we'll be using a non water based paint for the re-spray.