LISTER XJ40
I don’t enjoy doing bodywork, which is odd because I do a lot of it. I especially don’t like doing other people’s bodywork. I really especially don’t like doing bodywork for an obsessive polisher who is able to pick up on every imperfection and flaw from 30 paces in a tenth of a second.
We favour the 100mph paintjob. It looks shiny from the pitwall as it goes by at 100mph, when you can’t see runs, ripples, bits, dead flies etc. This has to be more like the 100mm paintjob. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’m going to achieve that.
Gloss was applied with a vaccuum cleaner, by candlelight, without taking the bag out.
The "professional" plastic masking caused more problems than the traditional newspaper method.
Not perfect, but not bad for an idiot.
Front bumper repaired, filled, and undercoated. Undertray fitted. Possibly a partridge in the trees.
GRP doors not the easiest thing to work with. The high and low spots change by the hour.
As straight as this one is going to get. Nine years it took to make this.
The panel production line was what you call busy.
No, the problem, other than the colour that gives you eighteen new ways to get the paintjob wrong, is the panels. Front wings are still steel, and they have been repaired, little bits cut away for weight, and tarted up. They aren’t bad, though one would reveal a dent to the wheelarch so large that it looks like it was intended, and there is no way that’s getting fixed for now. When the car gains fibreglass wings later, that will disappear. Why not fit GRP wings now? Well, they don’t exist yet, Bear has to invent them, and it’s not fibreglass weather yet.
That said, he does manage to make a GRP sunroof. Rather lighter than the old steel item, and it will probably actually seal better.
The wings, not a real worry. Bonnet and boot were fibreglass by the end of last season, they’re really just a flat and repaint. In fact the bonnet might just need a serious polish.
No, the worry are the doors. I really hate these doors. We’re going with steel door shells, suitably cut and lightened, with lexan windows, and fibreglass skins. To make the GRP skin, you first make a mold. That means making a perfect set of XJ40 doors, so you flat, filler and paint a set, then Bear uses them to make molds. I then ground those perfect skins off, vandalised the shells, and Bear made the new skins, which are then riveted and bonded to the steel shells. Took forever.
Tore the foam out. Left the door in the sun, and lo and behold, it found its shape again. Foam not the answer then. Days of filler and sanding and getting fucking nowhere. Gave up. That’s when I realise the door that was completely filled had no distortion, whipped the cans of foam out, filled the other two up again, fired up the air-powered bed sander, and spent two days covered in filler and primer dust, emerging looking like a Yeti and sounding like one as a flat-ish door was finally brandished in triumph.
If you want to know what a fibreglass door for an XJ40 costs, the answer is four million pounds. Is it lighter than a steel door? Yes, you fool, it’s fibreglass.
Front and rear skirts took some modification, but not much. There are superfluous parts to both, and they went missing. Every little helps. Well, you shed a kilo off the bodykit, it helps offset the weight of paint. The front skirt is a reproduction version and so gains an aluminium undertray to replace the missing original. The rules used to say you can’t have one unless the car had one, but the XJ40 did, so you can. If you were going to be a swine about it, and I am, there is nothing that said the undertray had to be the same as the original.
But none of that matters because in the 2014 regs that rule has gone anyway (why?) and it’s a free-for-all now. As it’s not my car, however, some sense has to be applied, so I restrain myself to an undertray that’s essentially the same size as production. You can’t be having the argument with an eligibility scrutineer about interpretation of the rules for someone else’s car, it’s not your entry fee at risk. To be fair, the undertray makes chuff-all difference anyway. I like airflow, I have a book about it, but unless you’re going to flat floor the car, it’s a bit pointless.
Shame you can’t offset the cost of paint in the same way as the weight, Christ is this expensive. If paint dried instantly, prep breaks down as follows: painted shell, 5 days, wings and sideskirts, one full day, front and rear bumper, half a day. Bonnet and boot, half a day. Headlight trim, an hour. Doors, three weeks.
Having done the doors, I have a plan to do them faster and better next time, if there were a next time. There won’t be a next time.
Doors are, in fact, the last piece to go on the car, which is a pain because they have to go on before the wings. Confused yet? Good.
Part 15 - Blue Harvest.
By contrast, the driver’s door we left steel, because it was the driver’s door. Erased the most obvious dents in about an hour. Bastard thing. Once they were painted, all the doors were all still full of ripples and dents. Gave up and fitted them anyway. None of them fitted, because not only are we putting a different car’s doors on, but we’ve reskinned them. Violence made them fit, some pulled, some pushed, some slammed onto objects, some lifted, some twisted. They open and close, but I’m not totally pleased with any of them. But, they do the job.
As you may have gathered by this point, gentle listener, I did not enjoy this part.
Then the annoying part. The strengthening ribs pulled the fibreglass out of shape, giving each skin a visible external ripple, which has to be erased. It’s not strong enough to withstand a proper sanding, because the fibreglass falls away from you as you push. The plan was to keep the windows operable, so we couldn’t foam-fill the front doors. Days of sanding and fillering and getting fucking nowhere go by. This was mostly late in 2013, thought I’d start this early. Eventually filled one of the doors with that 2-part expanding foam, and partially-foamed one of the others, which finally got me somewhere with the filler, so that was clearly the answer, put the doors aside for the winter. Picked them up again in March, and the partially-foamed door had distorted around the foam. For God’s sake.
The shell isn’t really a problem. It has had a few dents in its time, and there are a good number of places where welding has flaked the paint off, window apertures have been aflame where the cage was welded in, but it’s mostly about a good scrape, scratch and sand. There’s a lot of sanding, admittedly, I wore clean through my own skin and started bleeding on the job, but it’s standard stuff, just time. It can’t be made perfect, but it can be made better than it was.
Fibreglass sunroof and door in gloss. We almost look half competent.
With the paint thrown, and the acres of masking peeled away, we’re in the final throes and it’s time to do that part we secretly like, hurling large piles of shiny things at the car.
Next time: Part 16 – pimp that ride!
Panel fitting took some time. There does come a point at which you say, it's a racing car, it's done.
Putting the wings on before you've hung the doors means doing it all over again...