Building an R1 Powered Seven: Prep for painting

Building an R1 Powered Seven

A few years ago I got it in my head to build a kit car. After months of searching I came across the Locost concept. In short, quite a few amateur hobbiests around the world have built their own Lotus 7 inspired cars from scratch, following plans available on a variety of Internet sites and published in a book by Ron Champion.

I started gathering parts and finally began building the chassis in July '05. In August '10 the car was titled, licensed and is now street legal. The following blog captures the progress of the build and driving experiences after completion.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Prep for painting

I started cleaning up some of the suspension parts for painting. I'm using simple green as a degreaser, followed by a rust desolving gel (phosphoric acid based). This seems to work very well, but the mess and fumes (from the rust remover) are a little worse than expected, so I'm not sure I want to do everything in the basement. Also, once the metal is prepped, it should be painted within a day. If it were summer, that wouldn't be a problem. But finding a place to do all this indoors is more of a challenge than expected.

In the mean time I ordered some more stuff from JC Whitney.

Insulation for tunnel
http://www.jcwhitney.com/autoparts/ItemBrowse/c-10101/s-10101/p-100000328424/mediaCode-ZX/appId-100000328424/Pr-p_CATENTRY_ID:100000328424

Fender welting
http://www.jcwhitney.com/autoparts/ItemBrowse/c-10101/s-10101/p-100000235653/mediaCode-ZX/appId-10729232/Pr-p_CATENTRY_ID:10000023565310729232

Seat belts
http://www.jcwhitney.com/autoparts/ItemBrowse/c-10101/s-10101/p-100000170017/mediaCode-ZX/appId-100000170017/Pr-p_CATENTRY_ID:100000170017

Also bought a Harbor Freight air riveter to save some time when fastening the aluminum panels. Now I need to buy an air compressor...
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=93458