My day job has been exceptionally busy the last few weeks. In the grand scheme of things the paying job takes priority over La Bala. Luckily I love my day job, but it has been a bummer putting in so many hours and not being able to play with my car. 

Today I finally got to spend a few hours out in the garage. It was a bitter sweet experience. As I was jacking up the rear of the car to get it a little higher I heard a slight cracking sound. To my horror a series of cracks formed in the bodywork along a number of the ribs... These cracks formed mainly at the rear of the car... Please click the read more link for complete story.

My first thought of course was that the entire body was going to fall apart and I had just lost all those long months of work because my grand experiment in bodywork had failed.

Well, I stopped to think about the problem for a while and concluded that when I added the GT bumps I had made a series of transverse cuts through the central support of the engine decklid. This had weakened the central spine and when I raised the back of the car by jacking it up from one corner instead of from the center it had twisted the bodywork just enough to crack the drywall plaster. The plaster is completely rigid and has to crack since it has no give. There really is no good solution since the frame and the bodywork are joined. However I did add a number of 2x4 supports between the frame and the bodywork underneath each of the wheelwells. This will not solve the problem, but mainly I won't be jacking the car up from a corner anymore until the plug is finished and the molds pulled. Jacking up the car from a central point at the rear and the front does not twist the frame. I still believe that the frame is quite rigid, it's just that jacking up the entire rear of the car from one corner caused it to twist ever so slightly.

To fix the cracks in the bodywork I used a spatula to break up the drywall along the affected ribs. Then I pried out the drywall and some of the foam underneath too. This left big gaping gashes in what was once almost finished bodywork. Oh the horror. I applied some chemical hardening patch compound into the gaps and waited for it to harden. It hardens in a couple of minutes which is much faster than the drywall compound. The drywall compound takes up to a day depending on the thickness.

 Earlier I mentioned that the experience of having the bodywork crack was bittersweet. I would have obviously preferred that the problem not occur at all, but since it did, I took the opportunity to try out some of the powedered chemical reacting patching compound 'Fix-It-All'. I am really glad that I did! The powdered patching compound has to be mixed with water in a bucket and this makes it more inconvenient than the gypsum based drywall joint compound. It also lights off very very quickly and so has a short working time. The powder is white, but you can see from the photo that it dries to an ugly yellow color. And the stuff is HARD!

Taking the lesson learned about the hardness of the patching compound I proceeded to mix a few very runny batches of the stuff and I started applying it to a number of surfaces of the car. It applies easily and dries incredibly hard. I may consider covering the entire car in this stuff!

Here is my lesson learned for the day. If I were to build another plug out of ribs, foam and filler compound I would make the skeletal bracing stronger. I would also use some sort of solid blocking between each rib (nailed or glued). After using the hotwire to shape the foam, I would remove some of the foam along the edges of the ribs to allow the joint compound more surface area to adhere to. And the #1 thing I would do... I would use the chemical based patching compound as the first layer of surfacing over the foam. It is much stronger, much harder. Then once I had a base layer of the hard chemical based patching stuff down, I would apply the gypsum based drywall joint compound in thinner layers as an easy to sand surfacing layer.