Things looking pretty good so I decided to keep moving and put down the yellow coats. I have to be careful as once the color coat is put down, according to the directions, I only have 24hrs in which to put down something else on top. If I don't then I have to scuff the entire surface before the next coat gets put on, so my plan was to time it to lay down the last color coat in early evening.

Shot the first coat of yellow and you would not believe the imperfections that showed! Yellow shows EVERY little minor scratch, swirl, dip, etc!!! So I went ahead and used the Icing to fill in the more obvious ones, this is where things went wrong...

Well the standard hardner that they give you for the Icing is blue and once you sand the Icing the residual is blue, once you shoot it with a coat of yellow it turns GREEN and can bee SEEN through the color coat!!! Had I stopped to think about this I would have used some white hardner, but too late. In the problem spots I probably had to put on about four more coats to get it to cover the green, and of coarse in one or two spots you can still vaguely see it.

I still have the doors, front trunk lid and roof to finish up - and then God said "Let There Be YELLOW":

The Gravitex is a stone resistant 1-part paint treatment that can be used inside wheel wells, it comes with a throw-away sprayer that attaches directly onto the bottle and comes in a couple of colors, I got black. The directions state that for an orange-peal finish that a pressure of 40 - 70psi is used. So I spent an hour or so in masking off the front of the vehicle and underneath around the wheel wells and I set my regulator to 50psi and shot the insides of both wheel wells.

The 1 liter bottle just made it through both wheel wells with a little left over to touch up any missed spots. Very happy with the results as it leaves a nice finish and made the insides of the wheel wells look finished.

Here are a couple of shots of the dashboard, I feel that the black has too much gloss to it and might see if there is a way to tone it down a bit possibly with a satin type finish :

Eventually once I get the instrument cluster mounted I will make a covering for the front of the dash to help pull it together.

These will be inserted into the dash for defrosting of the windshield. I have to get them in before I can get the windshield glass installed next week, otherwise will be difficult to put in afterwords as the windshield would get in the way. Here is picture of them (not quite sure what size they are yet) :
NOTE: These turned out to be WAY too small - unusable for my application.

Per Shep he used the Krylon Fusion paint around the inside edge of the acrylic that he put in for the door windows. You cut back the protective coating for about 3/4-1" around the perimeter of the acrylic and spray paint it, let it sit overnight and the next day mount the windows using 3M Automotive Acrylic Plus Attachment Tape to seal it to the window gutter area of the door (the width of the tape would depend on the gutter width). Shep also said that he felt that some retaining screws should still be used (about 12" apart) to help retain the acrylic to the door.

The SEM-39143 black trim paint will be used for painting the mirrors, dashboard and louvers, however if the Krylon works out well then I just might return the trim paint (as the mirror housings are plastic) and use the Krylon for these areas as well.

I purchased a quart of the POR-15 paint as it is used for chassis frames and is a rust preventive/anti-corrosive paint. My intention was to use this on the engine subframe, swing arm and front subframes as well. It is supposed to be a very hard and durable paint that is impervious to most chemicals once it dries completely.

In reading the data sheet on how to apply it, it states "POR-15 likes rusted surfaces best. Seasoned metal and sandblasted metal are also good. POR-15 does not adhere well to smooth, shiny surfaces, but will adhere well to those surfaces with the proper preparation.". So I will probably just rough up the components by hand with some sand paper and use some acetone to remove any oils prior to painting since they are too large to fit into the sandblasting cabinet. Initially I was going to use a grinder to prep the surfaces, but not after reading this.

In addition the data sheet states that the paint is UV sensitive so that any components that are have direct exposure to sunlight that they be top-coated. So I will probably shoot a coat of clear onto the swing arm to help block UV rays.

As I was also trying to put in the new stainless jack shaft a problem became evident that it was between .001-.002" oversize and would not go into the pillow blocks. In measuring it was exactly 1.000" but it appears that the inside dimension of the pillow blocks are about .999", I will have to bring this back to the machine shop to correct.

BTW: ALL bolts/nuts that I have used have been treated with Locktite Blue. The Blue version allows removal/tightening of them in the future while the Red states that it is permanent (what ever that means).

I got almost all of the front suspension/hubs/brake calipers attached, I will have to get a couple of bolts/nuts to complete but got pretty far. One thing that I noticed, since I switched to the 4-bolt brake calipers I had to modify the brake backing plates slightly. It would appear that the calipers are slightly larger and a couple of small pieces need to be trimmed from the backing plates so that they do not interfere with the calipers. Below is a picture of one of the backing plates with some lines showing the trim points:

Well I picked them up tonight and they look terrific! All of the gutter areas were squared off, good edges, radiuses and all around wonderful job - Thank you Paul! One of his secrets is that he only uses Icing and used a little over one tube per door. I have a little bit of work to do on the insides and still have to put in a small panel where the bear claws are before I can paint them. Am looking forward to painting the doors, front trunk lid and sunroof this weekend. Here is a couple of pictures of the drivers side door:

I received the dashboard vents tonight and my fears were confirmed, they are WAY too small for my application. So I went out to my trusty donor vehicle (1998 Isuzu Trooper) and removed the 3 defroster vent covers from it. Two of them are about 12" long and one was about 5" long, both of them with a slight curvature to them. I will be using the smaller one on the left side of the instrument cluster 'hump' and one long one on the other side.

I had forgotten to remember that a portion of the windshield goes past the inside of the dash area, so I moved the vent cover as far over towards the instrument cluster 'hump' as possible. A portion of the vent cover will be non-functional but it was the best that I could do.

After I completed drilling and grinding through these areas I trimmed back the foam under the fiberglass top back a bit and shoved some body filler into the gap that I made around the vent cover to help seal up this area. I do not want water or humidity to start accumulating underneath the fiberglass top of the dashboard. I still have some work to do tomorrow evening with finishing off the vent areas with some Icing and finally repainting the dashboard with the flat black aerosol paint that I previously purchased.

In hind-sight I could have made the instrument cluster 'hump' a bit shorter so that I could have accomodated one of the longer vent covers to extend behind it, but did not think of it at that time. Here are a couple of pictures so that you can see how I oriented the defroster vent covers:

I had previously made the appointment to reserve a time slot and in all it took about 3-1/2 hours to get it to fit near perfectly and put it in. I had only two choices either clear or a slight green tint, I went with the green tint and glad that I did even the acrylic that I have is tinted grey. Here are a couple of pictures:

They did not carry any universal sunroof kits so I will have to acquire this item from somewhere else locally.

I finall finished the doors at about 4:00pm, emptied out the shop, put back up all paper masking and washed down the floor, and finally let the air filter out for a bit.

By 5:30 I started to put down primer on the doors, front trunk lid and hard top sunroof. Got all coats of primer put down by about 6:30 then had to wait an hour for the primer to harden enough to do some spot Icing on areas that 'popped' once primer was shot.

7:30pm I started putting down the white sealer coat, color coats and finally clear coats. Ok so I finished at about 12:30am (including the clean-up) and am quite happy with the results. It seems that I really enjoy shooting paint, but the prior grunge work to get to that point I would be happy to do without... I guess that it is all a part of the process.

I used a 12' piece of steel hung across the shop to hang the doors so that I had complete access to all of the surfaces, here are some pics of the completed paint job.

I have to admit that I really like the yellow, once I shot the parts they just 'jumped' out at me and begged for more. I put down about three coats of color and four coats of clear.

Also got the latches and strikers re-installed as well as the gas springs and mirrors.

I am glad that I got the gas springs charged with 80lbs of pressure, with the additional weight of the body work, paint and mirrors they are just about perfect. All it takes is finger pressure to close them.

Here are a bunch of thumbnail images, click on the one you want to see a larger version of it:

The deck access plates will be used to cover the access holes in the rear 'pontoons'. They are watertight and are the screw out type.

Next I moved on to cutting out the acrylic windows for the doors. I am using 3/16" acrylic for the larger upper windows and 1/8" acrylic for the smaller lower window. First thing that I did was to tape some construction paper over the windows and tape into place, next I used my thumb and traced around the underlying window gutter, this made a relief on the paper. Using a pencil I traced around all of the corners, removed the paper and using a straight edge made the straight lines more visible, and using a scissors cut out the templates and marked which side of the vehicle that they came from.

Then I taped the templates to the sheet of acrylic, traced the template outline onto the acrylic and using my circular saw cut the straight edges out out leaving about 1/16" extra material. You have to take the cuts nice and slow otherwise you can get chipped edges, my saw has a laser guide which made it easy to follow the lines. I have a combination belt/disc sander on a workbench that I used to sand all of the edges down to where they fit almost perfectly into the window gutters. This takes quite a bit of time (about 1hr per window) as there is a lot of checking and double-checking as the sanding proceeds, do not try to hurry this! Finally I used the belt sander to put a radius on both the inside and outside edges, with a bit larger radius on the inside edges. Lastly I used a sanding pad on all edges.

I plan on using the 1/2" acrylic attachment tape for the larger windows so using a safety razor I cut back the protective paper coating using a 3/4" border. On the smaller windows I cut back the border to 1/2" wide as I plan on using the 1/4" acrylic tape on these, if I am able to use the 1/2" tape for the smaller windows then I will.

One thing that the instructions also mention is to be sure to touch the sticky sides of the tape as little as possible so no body oils get onto it, so handle it by the edges as much as possible. The tape would not wrap well around corners so I cut the ends using a sharp scissors and put a bevel on each end and matched it up as well as possible with the opposing edge attempting to eliminate any gaps that moisture might be able to leak through.

Once the tape was in place I used my fingers to press it down to the gutter surface being sure to eliminate any bubbles, you have to press pretty hard and I found that using the plastic handles of the scissors worked pretty well.

Before removing the plastic coating I practiced a couple of times putting down the acrylic window into the frame, then removed the coating strip and put in the windows and once in place went around the entire window edge pressing it firmly onto the tape. Here are a couple pictures of the installed windows:

I also got the front pop-up headlight assemblies in place they need a little bit of adjustment but will deal with that later on. The pop-up mechanism that connects the motors to the headlights also got painted and installed.