Break it Before You Make It

In a sense I guess it was a curse and a blessing that my aero blew up prior to paint for two reasons: I’d learn how to repair fiberglass and I’d learn how to repair fiberglass on unpainted aero. Can you imagine if I cracked my aero two days after painting it? Now that I had a feeler for how low the car sat and what to avoid doing – like driving over planted pieces of wood – I had more of a sense of confidence with driving the car. This would probably mean I wouldn’t be as scared to drive around with the fresh paint down the road. Anyway, on to the repairs!

Per usual, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I didn’t know what to buy, what to use, how to use it, where to begin so of course: Justinzenki to the rescue. He told me what to buy from Walmart and I went off to begin the reparation process. I got to Walmart and found a security glass full of Bondo goods. Side note: Bondo is a company not a product, kind of like how we call Lysol wipes, Lysol wipes and not disinfecting wipes. This is news to me. Anyway, Bondo has a fuck ton of products. I’m the type of person to hoard and overstock so… I bought pretty much one of everything. I just hate going back and forth to the store unnecessarily, it’s such a drag. Okay, on to the actual repairs, to begin(this is a very high level overview, honestly not too sure why I’m even writing this out): you have to mix the fiberglass resin and hardener with a brus- fucking hell I forgot to buy brushes. Back to the store. Alright, to begin: mix the resin with the hardener yada yada ya, it’s essentially like paper machete.. mashay.. mechete? Hold on- yeah paper machete. Cut the fiberglass mats and lay them down, brush it, and repeat, then let it dry over night. Simple. As. That.

Fast forward to the next day and the resin didn’t dry up because I didn’t use enough hardener. You can pretty much jump to the top of this post because I had to do everything over again, but guess what! I didn’t fuckin’ dry AGAIN. So this last time we went to town on the hardener and it finally decided to do what it was made to do. I didn’t take many photos of this process because of how messy it was so here’s a photo of Garcia (@justinzenki) and I slaving away on the job.