Resurrecting a 144k FD by Fd3BOOST

6 minute(s) of a 196 minute read

Thanks to all for the kind words. You really do need to keep your families involved in your hobbies otherwise it can drive you apart. 

So about the car again. I had not originally planned on painting the car but in all honesty I just have no desire to own a red car. It's not my color, never has been and so the decision to paint the car was pretty easy to make. I know that I wanted blue but I wanted something different than the 99 factory Innocent Blue mica, which was on my last car. Now my wife thinks that using blue at all is silly considering I just sold a clean blue rx7. I'm a creature of habit so blue it is. I spent several days pouring over paint chips form House of Kolor. I really wanted to go with Cobalt Kandy blue but I've never sprayed a Kandy and they Kandy paint is not something to play with unless you're a professional body man, which I am not. So I decided to go with Lake violet Pearl as seen here...

So I made a list of all the supplies I will need, and placed my order through Amazon. About 10 days later the supplies started arriving. After I got a look at the paint I felt that it had more purple in it than I really wanted. Here is the House of Kolor Lake Violet pearl in the can.

Under light, 

Now after ordering $900 worth of painting supplies, I then decided that I did not like the color and wanted another House of Kolor paint, Majik Blue Pearl as seen here... 

At this point i called in and spoke to a rep at TCP Global, the supplier who I was getting the paint from and he sold me on a few more products. So another $850 later I get the remaining products to get rolling on the primer, paint etc... I have extra supplies that I will likely return when I am done to recoup some of my expenses. 

Here is the Majik blue pearl in the can. This paint is a lighter shade and does not have the added Purple. I have considered mixing two quarts of the Lake Violet into four quarts of the Majik pearl and renaming it the custom color " Majik Haze" Hey I'm a Hendrix fan...

Another topic, 

Front bumper: 

As you can see from years of using a front plate on the car, the front had become deformed. I never had a front plate on any of my three previous FD's so I never before encountered this problem. 

So I heated it up with a heat gun and rubbed it out as best I could and then started to do some fill work. 

It came out okay...

Then I got it in my head that I wanted to eliminate the side markers. This was a purely esthetic choice and really probably not legal, but since I have a car that is getting Historic tags, I won't have to worry about passing a safety inspection in Maryland. 

Here is the process of the removal of the side markers. 

Making a paper template, 

Transferring to 18 gauge aluminum, 

Cutting out on the bandsaw, 

Epoxy the blanks into place, 

Now to fill the void with Alumilite plastic 

Filled in, 

Starting to skim fill with "Rage" 

And the final result prior to primer,

And for those interested in how to do this, a 4 min vid. can be found on this link. 

I tried to embed the video but apparently I don't know how. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW1cx...ature=youtu.be