Finito Veneto

Ahhhhh, do you smell that? No, it's not another butterfly fart, it's the sweet smell of success! We have completed the Verucci Veneto's restoration!

After all the sanding/painting/sanding-properly/painting-again we set aside a few hours last Saturday to assemble the body work. In my mind, while the act of assembling is easy, putting the right bit in the right place with the right screw was going to be tough. We had approximately 15 pieces for the body work and what-might-as-well-have-been a million screws, nuts, bolts, etc. All in one pile.

Fortunately, if you start from the middle and sort of work your way out, it's pretty obvious what needs to go where and - most of the time - there tends to be only one type of screw/bolt for each purpose. Either that or we just got lucky.

Here she is fully-assembled:





We had a couple of stray screws left over (I figure they must have multiplied somehow like bacteria) but everything feels very sturdy and it all came together nicely.

Oh, and despite vowing to never work with fibreglass ever again, we did decide to do some additional work on a couple of structural pieces to make sure they're as secure as they can be. And this time round, it really wasn't that bad. Prior planning and preparation prevents piss poor phibreglass, as they say.

Here's the before-and-after pic:



So, thanks for following our blog! And here's to many more successful (or not) fixits!

Stay tuned for our next project…

Enter Sandman

It's been a while... but we've still been busy.

A few weeks ago, we tackled the surprisingly-theraputic job of sanding the body parts. Most of the old paint was peeling off and our fiberglass work left some residual resin in a few places, so we figured it was best to strip everything thing down to the original plastic.

A bit of elbow grease plus a couple of orbital sanders made light work of the paint-removal and we were soon applying the first coat of our stealthy-black paint, spraying the pieces of bodywork underneath the reassembled (useless) gazebo/paint-booth.

A week later and we examined our work. Unfortunately, black paint isn't very forgiving and it certainly didn't cut us any slack exposing the nasty side-effect of using an orbital sander (with 200-grit paper): swirls. They were all over the place.

We figured we needed to go down to a finer grit and settled on using 600-grit, thanks to a recommendation from a man who's done this kind of thing before (I thought we were the only ones). We used the paper dry at first, then wet. It worked like a charm. The swirls disappeared and left us with a perfect surface to apply our remaining coats.

Not sure how many we ended up applying in the end, but with some expert guidance from Jason's mum, we had everything painted in no time.



We left the parts to cure for a couple of weeks before tackling the reassembly.