Monday, 23 September 2019

FHC resto nr. 80; Door striping

It has been a few months ago since I carried out some work on the orange FHC. But with a few days of my vacation left I decided to pay a visit to the shed. As reported earlier there are a few jobs that have to be done to the car before any other tasks can be carried out. And today I finished one of those tasks; fitting these two parts of my striping kit to the doors.


In these two previous posts (#34 and #35), from well over four years ago, I outlined how I made them. As it is easier to fit these with the door positioned on a level surface, so this job had to be done before the doors were fitted to the car.
The actual fitting process is rather straightforward. Wash the door properly and add the adhesive stripe, with the positioning foil over the front of the stripe still in place, to the wet surface. This way it is easy to position/align it without all the different parts of the striping wandering all over the place! As reference or alignment point I decided to use the door handles opening.


With the stripe in the correct position I used a bank card, a window squeegee and a hairdryer to remove all the water trapped underneath the striping, before removing the positioning foil. The only real problems I encountered was the fact that the thin positioning foil had started to age a bit. Which made it hard to remove in places. But with the necessary patience and a pen knife it came off in the end. And in some places a few very small pockets off water refused to move. Will see how that develops, once the sticker material that was used has settled down. So it is not a 100% perfect finish, but nevertheless quite happy with the end result!



And obviously there’s now no way back as for the engine of choice for this car. This brand new 16 Sprint head will eventually find its way under the bonnet.



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