Check out cerakote they sell both oven cure and air cure formulas but they are $$$ the air cure I used for the exhaust has like a 5 day cure time, you can handle it with a few hours but they say it needs 5 days before heating and it’s sensitive to humidity, I did mine back in February when humidity was low and used a garage heater to keep the garage at around 68*-72*

 

Small update just to keep things rolling, adapted the throttle body for HD clamps today, also finished pipe work for the intercooler charge pipes, still need to weld in MAF flange and separate IAT sensors for my digital dash display. At the moment my plan going forward is to finish the Turbo fab and coinciding electrical work before painting the car. I’m thinking of pulling the entire front end, seam welding the engine bay and doing a light bay shave to clean things up a bit for paint. I’m also thinking of redoing the powder coating on the intake manifold, it didn’t come out great to begin with and it’s been bothering me. I also have plans to re-run the fuel rail lines with a new fuel regulator, the Perrin one I’ve been using bleeds off pressure very quickly and isn’t really rated for the flow of the Holly dominator fuel pump. Also purchased a few things to help with tuning, I’m installing individual cylinder EGT probes which will help balance AFR from cylinder to cylinder under load. I’m in Texas and it’s hot season right now so progress is slow, I’m only spending a half hour a day if that working on the car right now. Paint will start progressing once it starts to cool down

 

I know there is a practical and a safety related use for the 2nd fire wall but taking them out has free’d up a ton of space back behind the neck of the plenum.

 

Well it’s been about a year since I last posted here, sorry for the lack of updates been super busy at work and even moved to a new place so I just haven’t been able to give this thread the attention it deserves but I wanted to give a quick update. Car is in the paint process now, all of the hail damage to the body and panels have been repaired. As she sits now the interior and windows have also been stripped and various parts are already in color unfortunately I really haven’t taken many photos as the work was done but I’ll share what I have

Mixed up a red candy metallic based as the main color


Got the car to the paint and body shop

Started stripping pieces off the car

Carbon fiber roof panel before installation

After installation

Some pics of shaping the bumper

More tare down

Getting the door jambs and roof ready for paint

Masking off the car, notice the roof is masked off too. The carbon fiber doesn’t get sealer or base coat only candy and clear

House of kolor silver sealer

Basecoat

After candy and clear layers


it’s hard to see with the angle the pictures were taken but the carbon fiber with the candy coat looks sick

Inside of the doors were next, tried painting several things along with them but humidity was really high and I ended up getting solvent pop in a few and had to revisit them so I’ll skip those



Then we had a week of nasty storms and I didn’t want to risk painting so I went on a complete tangent and decided I didn’t like the rear deck anymore and cut it out

This weekend I painted the underside of the hood and inner fender cut in but I ran out of time and didn’t get around to taking pictures, I’ll try and remember to grab some when I go to take them out of the booth tomorrow. Then I’ll be gearing up to paint the quarter panels, door outsides, fenders and top of the hood. I’ll paint those parts all at once on the car so there won’t be any color variations when all is said and done

 

That's going to turn out amazing.. Respect on the effort.

I expect I'll do a full respray somewhere in the next 3-5 years, but in the mean time I'm probably going to do a wrap with 3M Black Cherry, a pretty similar colour to what you've chosen.

 

WOW........

That is going to be Beautiful.............

You are doing the Paint & Body work?

It sure Looks like a Pro Job......Awesome

 

Thank you! And yeah my work is letting me use the paint booth after hours, paint and body work is all my doing

 

Up close pic of the candy over the carbon


and some pics of the hood and fenders

 

good looking paint.. my advice is to drill out those spot welds and remove the rest of the metal behind the seats.. the front edge of the floor can be easily pushed flat and used to sit a flat panel across to create a floor over top of all of that.. i have some pics in my own lengthy build thread here if u want a preview.

 

Dam you do Nice Work!

 

Well this is still an ongoing project. I did paint the exterior but it didn’t go so well. The candy came out striped for a number of reasons. I’m not the sturdiest painter and was doing the candy layer in a single coat that and I had the fan settings on the gun to narrow. So there were dark and light strips that could be seen if you looked closely










ultimately I decided I needed to take a step back as I was very discouraged from the outcome, this was back in July. I took time to think about how I could improve my results and decide I would spend time practicing spraying, sand the whole car back down. And when I felt I was ready I would try again but reduce concentration of my candy and do 3 layers instead of 1. So I spent August, September, October, and November practicing my spray form with easy work projects. At the beginning of December I returned to the project by sanding the entire exterior back down to the body work to start from scratch. From there I primed it again


then went and added an acoustic barrier to the area between the trunk and bumper then removed the old sound mat in the trunk area with dry ice, which by the way made it super easy to remove. I’ll replace it with nicer stuff when I do the interior






I did decide to make a change in direction for a part of the project after this, instead of doing the entire body in the metallic candy paint I decided that I would do a carbon fiber overlay of the existing fenders and do candy over those. Also I decided that instead of painting hood, fenders, doors, and quarters at the same time I would do doors and quarter panels together and do the hood and then fenders by themselves. This should make the process more distributed and easier to manage the spray sessions. I did finish painting the carbon fiber A pillars and mirrors during this time too but I mostly got video and will have to get pictures later. I also changed my painting process and it is showing promising results. Before I was doing sealer - base coat - Intercoat - candy - clear coat all in one session and it was taking very long to do so many layers in one go. When I did my mirrors I didn’t want to do that because there are sections of the mirrors that aren’t carbon fiber and needed base coat and I wanted the transition to be seamless so I did the sections that needed base coat and then sprayed clear coat over the entire mirror carbon and all, Cured it, wet sanded it, then sprayed the candy layers and cleared again. Doing the job in two sessions with wet sanding in between produced an excellent result. So much so that I decided I would do all the rest of the painting this way which brings us back to the exterior of the car. Now I blocked the primer with 600 grit did silver sealer - base coat - clear and it came out great. Already blocked the clear with 600 again and am almost ready for candy and clear layers. Hopefully this time the candy layer will go better

As for other developments, I purchased new quarter windows from Z1 but when I got them they were both passenger side. Contacted Z1 and they had me send one back and are working to get me a drivers side quarter windows.


For the engine I purchased Z1 high powered ignition coils since they are higher output than the R8 coils I’ve been using. To pair with that I purchased the CZP aluminum valve covers. I think the next big purchase for the engine will be the pathfinder cooling mod kit from CZP

Lots of rollercoaster ups and downs for the project but it’s back on track now

 

Some pics of mirrors and a-pillars