Interior painted!

We dropped down to the spray shop today - the inside of the car has been sprayed and it looks amazing. The inside of the doors are also sprayed. Matt from the spray shop took some photos during the spray process - he's going to send them through later.

The outside of the car is primed and rubbed back - it looks fantastic.

Rear sill

Engine bay

Driver's side door jam

The exterior was all set to be sprayed earlier this week (on Monday), until this happened to the primer on the bonnet - it just started peeling off. The paint supplier was called in - they came to look at the damage today and have taken some samples back to Sydney. Matt is going to re-prime the bonnet, then hang the doors and do the big spray!

Paint on the bonnet!

We got to see a sample spray of the underside of the bonnet this afternoon. The colour looks amazing - nice & sparkly! Now the full load of paint will be orders for application over the next week or two.

Engine work

While the shell has been in the body shop Dad's been doing a lot of work on the engine rebuild. There are lots more shots coming that I'll add when I get them.

Here's one when it was all assembled with the gearbox attached. Looking mighty impressive!

Primed and masked up

The car is looking good at the spray shop. We dropped in about a fortnight after we too these shots and it was all rubbed down inside - hopefully the next shot is a sample spray on the underside of the bonnet.

Transporting to the Paintshop

On August 9 2010 we loaded te shell onto my trailer and moved it to the spray shop - thanks for the help Denis!

Finally painting - undercoat

Next step was to get some undercoat onto the shell...

Learning to weld!

In late June / early July Dad learnt to weld and made some great progress. The animation below shows how we assembled the the front-end using the subframe as a reference...

Rolling the shell over again

Underside of the bonnet

We spot welded the the A frame back in - looking good!

Underbody

We did a lot of work on the underbody in July, including rolling the car over a few times...

New motoring museum in Wollongong

We went out to the opening of the new Motoring Museum in Wollongong last weekend. It was opened by Sir Jack Brabham - pretty impressive! Lots of people there and lots of great cars on display - here's a selection of the shots we took...

A nice little Morris Minor 850 - 1962

A really well presented old Falcon

Riley & a Riley!

Pretty cool Charger (even though it's pink!)

A nice sky blue classic saloon

Red clubby van

Green clubby van

A really nice looking (1275) Moke... this will have to be another project (one day!)

Found a classic mini in (something like) the right colour!

The boys, Dad & I went along to the opening of the new motoring museum in Wollongong last weekend (more on that in my next post). The best bit was that we found a classic mini on display painted in a colour that looks really close to Space Blue. This one has a silver roof (we're going for white).

Colour codes

Found a great reference for all of the new mini colour codes. Dad was able to find someone in Wollongong (Gladstone Ave) who gave us some great advice on how to prep for painting. We got a sample of Space Blue (A49) which is pretty close to Horizon Blue - the sample looks a bit dark but it should be great.

Did a few searches and found some real-world pics - it was used as part of a special edition in 05/06 which came with a silver roof...

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