Tale of the 10 footer

OK, so for the first day or two of owning our first Corvette, I was wearing my rose coloured glasses. At the forefront of the mind was just the fact that I had a ‘Vette parked in the garage. I spent the first couple of days just getting to know the car...….like..... why didn't the passenger side door open properly? ...broken spring; how do you put the lights on high beam? …. hmmm; Why didn't the windscreen wipers work?......no earth; where is the washer bottle?…. dunno. (Turned out it didn’t have a washer bottle.)

Then I noticed them, those little pimples in the paint on the rear deck. The more I looked, the more of them I found. Then there was the “edge” around the door handles. They hadn’t been removed for the car’s last paint job, just masked around. Then there were the cracks in the front bumper cover, the sagging of the urethane rear cover, the cracks in the bonnet where some clunk head had put a lonnnnnng air cleaner stud in and slammed the bonnet shut etc. etc, etc.

From 10 foot away, the 1975 Corvette looked great. Put it under the Walker microscope and it left a lot to be desired. Only one thing to do…… re-paint it.

Looked at a number of Corvette Forum sites and found lots of good but contradictory advice on how to strip the paint. One suggestion was “use citrus based stripper”. Tried that and could probably have peed on it with a better result! “Don’t use stripper, use a sander” was another suggestion. There are so many nooks & crannies on a Corvette so I discounted that idea. Besides, coarse paper on fiberglass ??? I don’t think so. So, after a discussion with Scott Girard from Corvette Alterations & Conversions, I decided to use proper automotive paint stripper.

Dayle & I set to it one Saturday. We figured we should get it done over the weekend. Wrong again… Just one door took over 4 hours. The stripper generally only takes off one coat of paint. This ‘ol girl had lots of coats ……. would never have been cold in a snow storm!

Tried a bit of stripper on the rear urethane bumper cover. Found out that urethane doesn’t like paint stripper. The bit I did ended up soft & soggy, a bit like a marshmallow. Had to find a fix for that, which will be covered in another installment.

So, weeks and weeks later, with 5 empty 4 litre cans of paint stripper lying around the back yard, the job was done. Now I might start to get rid of those funny scaly things on my hands. And maybe a beer might taste like a beer again.

With the C3 Corvette now completely in the raw, the evidence of the argey bargey (MS Word doesn’t like that one) that she has been in over the years is clearly visible. Guess I’ll just have to teach myself how to fix fiberglass.