Team Hass

18/09/05 - The paint goes on

As the rally is getting rather close, we thought we'd better sort the car out.  Turns out we picked a good day, as it didn't rain all day on Sunday 18th September.  Which was nice, as we wanted a nice, even paint finish...  Hmmm.

First up, Nick got to work on fitting our "scanner" to the grille.  The scanner is actually a novelty brake light set, with two LED light bars (purchased for about £20 on eBay).  The sweep of the lights is pretty impressive, being very close to how KITT's scanner worked on the Knight Rider TV show.

Whilst Nick was trying not to get electrocuted, I got to work masking up the lights and the edges of all the windows.  Once that was done, I set about the bodywork with a handful of wire wool, to "key" the existing paint.

Next job for Nick was to fit the air horn set he had bought me as a present (very thoughtful bloke, that Clode).  Air horns in place, Nick modified the front bumper (i.e. cut some holes in it for the air horns to stick out of), then grabbed himself some wire wool and got busy on the bodywork.  Just when it looked like the hard work had settled in, our mate Russ turned up to drop off some coriander (don't ask).  Of course, we roped him in!

Once we three merry men had wire-woolled the car sufficiently, and rubbed the dust off with some wet J-cloths, the Hammerite gloss garage door paint and a set of Homebase's cheapest paintbrushes came out.  You can guess the rest.

See the Picture gallery for this story in pictures.