Smoothing the engine bay
Once I had emptied the engine bay, I felt that an overall tidy up to remove holes made by previous owners when fitting aftermarket accessories, and various dimples wrinkles and spot welds from the factory was in order. As this is a process that is rarely documented, but really quite easy, I thought I would detail it here.
The first step was to cut off any of those fold down metal tabs used to hold wiring, brake lines and other hoses and grind those points smooth using a 4" angle grinder. Picture 1 shows these tabs circled in red. At the same time I filled all the holes in the sheet metal by ensuring the surrounding metal was flat and then countersinking each hole slightly. After that was done normal aluminium rivets were used to fill the holes. Any metal from the rivet heads that stood proud of the metal was filed and sanded back (see picture 2 - filled holes circled). This meant the rivets protruded into the wheel wells, but once all the panels are back on it will be almost impossible to see them.
Now the job of filling all the dents, wrinkles, spot welds and other blemishes began. First step was to strip all the paint. to do this I used ordinary paint stripper (Selley's Kwik Strip is best!) followed by rubbing back with coarse grit sand paper. The now bare metal was treated with a rust converter solution to ensure no rust spots would come through. Once this was done, I began filling the larger areas with high strength body filler that contains stainless steel fibres to add plenty of strength. I then finished everything off with normal body filler. By the end of the job I had used about 250 grams of filler in total (and a lot of that was sanded off again!). Pictures 3, 4 and 5 show this in progress.
Once satisfied with the finish of the filler it was time to hit the filled areas with some high fill primer, which was also sanded back the ensure a good finish. the high fill primer is the yellow primer in pictures 6 and 7.
The final step was to finish off with undercoat primer, which has been applied in a single coat without sanding at this stage. Any further preparation will be left to the panel shop when the car goes off to be painted.
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