2008.05.09 Painting finished, dismantling starts

After hard work, roll cage is finally painted. It looks not bad, not good. Assuming circumstances, I personally think, that result is very good (no time to really work on it, no light, no expierence with two component paint, HVLP spray gun and high performance compressor). From objective judgement side, I can tell that result is about 6 from 10. Some shots of finished result:
Closer look:So now its time to pull engine out (to change gearbox, flywheel, clutch). Like always, I will do it by dropping engine and gearbox to basement. To achieve this - you need to dismount everything, and leave bare engine. So it started like this:And in the evening all the hoses, and fluids were out:

2008.05.08 Spraying black paint in the dark...

As I have mentioned, I was painting in lack of light. This is no go if you want to spray paint anything. Especially roll cage. White primer helped a bit, but not too much. After first paint layer, deeper inspection (without goggles) revealed, that covering was too terrible event for me. So took virutally every light source I had, and put it into the car. Results:It is obvious, that I have sprayed paint somewhere, but not on tubes. Especially in the places where shadows like to be:

2008.05.07 Filler for paint

As weather outside garage went from bad to worse (wind, rain +10), I was forced to work in a closed garage. After doing spray test of black paint on black/dark brown epoxy primer, I saw nothing, so it become obvious, that I need different color to see what I'm spraying. Also filler fills some surface imperfections (which tubes have). However you need to sand it for that. I've been too lazy to do this (this is roll cage, not the bling bling). After some experiments with thickness, thinner and air pressure, it started to go well :). It looked really nice (and matt surface hides all spraying mistakes).

2008.05.04 Painting started

First sprayed the cage with anti-rust epoxy primer. This is not the best choice for thing like roll cage, however it does not require any surface preparation (I had no time and patience to prepare anything). So it ate all the rust, and coated everything. Now nothing will rust there (tested on rusty garage elements ;)). It was just about 1000 times harder to spray that stuff on a tube, than on somewhat flat with no obstructions...

2008.05.03 Preparation for roll cage painting

So, roll cage is in place, we can proceed to painting. But how to mask the car? Usually I cover area with old newspapers, but this time I haven't had any. What if to use old supermaket bags which I have plenty of :).After few hours it started to get shape, and look like el cheapo rally car:Also covered the intercooler

At last!

At last I've got my baby back! Now it is grown up, with FIA homologated roll cage installed. I haven't seen my car for ages (50 days to be exact). Isn't it beautifull? More shots of the roll cageElectricity is all messed up, and fuse box is teared apart (roll cage goes through it now). It will be quite a challenge to start the car again...

Meanwhile...

As you may have noticed, no updates of this blog for a month. Main reason is that, bad luck strikes again. My car is stuck ant Sabotaitis racing, because of change of their working premises, so it was a bit lost in all the moving of stuff. Now it's in small garage with one guy working on it. That cost me another two weeks :cry: ...

However, I have continued to do some small things at the garage. Updates - ADZ after rebuild (nice and dry):ADZ box was rebuilt, however it has 20v input shaft, which is smaller (14.5mm if I remind correctly), and bearing in my AAN crank is 18mm. That is not big problem, however it's quite PITA to get old bearing out of crank, and it costs time. Did a quick search around and found AOB box. This thing is almost the same as AOB, but with thicker input shaft (and lucky for me it was reason to drop the price ;)). AOB (messy messy):