07.15.08
Delamination
The body came back from Plastic Media Stripping yesterday — pretty amazing service. It took them about 3 hours to bead blast the underside of the vehicle and get it down to raw fiberglass so that I can start the repairs on the main body. I also asked them to remove the gel coat in the area where the left rear fender had been damaged and this came out nicely (see the picture).
By removing all of the paint on the underside of the vehicle, I was able to locate certain defects in the body that weren’t visible before. One of the main concerns has to do with the two longitudinal stiffening ribs located in the front of the car — at either side of the hood. Both of these ribs have delaminated from the body for about the forward-most 8 inches and it’s easy to see why.
The electric version of the GT II has a special set of instructions that have you modify the body of the car in a different way than you would have done had you been building the gasoline-powered version. One of those change-orders has to do with how the hood is cut out and the change has you cut it very close to the stiffening ribs. A portion of the weight of the forward battery box is tranferred into these ribs by a pair of brackets — one each side — that connect the forward battery box to the ribs. These brackets also hold the mounts for the front bumper. With the dynamic loading of the batteries constantly bouncing and pulling on these ribs, it’s a wonder that they didn’t delaminate further. There is very little overlap between the glass on the ribs and the glass on the body — especially on the inboard sides of the ribs, where less than an inch of overlap exists.
Somehow, I’m going to have to grind away the delaminated fiberglass and reinforce the joints. Reinforcing the outboard sides will be easy — there’s lots of surface area there to make a good, strong structural lay-up. Reinforcing the inboard sides is something else again. I may need to wrap fiberglass onto the top (outside) of the body to make these joints strong. That will require a lot of cosmetic work on the outside of the body — on either side of the hood hole — to fix the joints.
The good news is that it’s better to find out now than when the car is on the road.
By the way — take a look at the first photo in yesterday’s entry. It shows the front end of the car with the two longitudinal stiffening ribs. My blog editor has a 4-photo-per-day limit, so I had to place this last photo in yesterday’s entry.
