Le Mans Mini Marcos: preparing for paint (1)

Have you ever painted a car? I hadn't and only had a rough idea on how to prepare a body for painting. But by now I know much of the ins and outs, thanks to fellow Dutchman and fellow (and multiple) Mini Marcos owner Joost van Diën, who is an excellent painter also. Joost happened to be in between jobs and managed to hire a professional spray booth to help me, and so we locked ourselves in for a week and spent most of the Christmas holidays in dust, working to get the body straight. Oh, I enjoyed every minute!

We also scratched our heads on how to fit the rear wheel arches properly. The ones I had refabricated needed trimming and finishing, but didn’t seem to fit perfectly to the body’s shapes. Historical photographs learned us that the edge where they touch the car’s body was originally thicker, also. We found a clever way to overcome all this. After having cut the arches to the right size, we taped in the wings where the arches touch the body, put a small stroke of filler on the arches, fitted them quickly and had the filler dry out. After an hour or so we removed the arches plus the tape and sanded all of the filler away, except for the edge. They now fit on to the body perfectly and have exactly the right thickness. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn when they were fitted the same way originally, too!
After days of sanding we were really happy with the result and both went home to celebrate Christmas. After Christmas we drove over once again to mask off all the holes and actually start applying the primer we had made by a real paint guru in Belgium, using the only original paint left now, to be found behind the car’s door locks, which is excellently conserved and thus perfect for colour matching. But that's for next week (with some videos, too).