What little time I have spent working on the car in May has been on repairing the rear wheel arches. When I bought the car I had no idea that the rear wheel arches had been altered, this was only discovered when I started to strip the paint off the car to get back to fibre glass. To make matters worse the driver’s side rear wing had also been involved in an accident. The only reason I can think the rear wheel arches where changed was so a previous owner could fit larger wheels at the rear.
The pictures below show the wheel arches before and after the repairs.
Once I had stripped all the paint and filler from the rear wheel arches it became obvious that if I wanted to fix it without spending a vast amount of money I would need a mould of another rear wheel arch. Luckily there was a Marcos owner nearby that was willing to let me make a mould. The method used was suggested by my father and although it does not create a perfect mould it was quick, easy and did not damage the paint work of the car I was copying.
I don’t have any photos of doing this but in summary you cover the area that you want to copy with masking tape to protect the paint. You then place a layer of cello tape on top of the masking tape to get nice non-stick surface (hopefully). You then buy a large pot of P40 fibre glass filler. You then carefully apply this filler on top of the cello tape to create your mould. After waiting 30-45minutes you can remove your mould. The only issue with making a mould like this is you have a lot of surface imperfections but if you’re more interested in the overall shape like me it makes no difference.
To use the mould you place cello tape on the inside of it to prevent the fibre glass you are going to lay up against it sticking. You then attach it to the car and then lay up your fibre glass matting and resin inside the mould and rear wing and wait for it to dry. Once the fibre glass has hardened the mould can be removed. This was not quite as easy as it should have been as the fibre glass resin managed to seep past the cello tape in places causing the mould to be stuck to the wing.
The rear wing was then sanded down and a small amount of filler applied to remove some small imperfections before a couple of layers of fibre glass tissue were placed over the repaired section. This was then sanded down. The panel is still note quite ready for painting as there are still some small imperfections but hopefully a thin layer of P38 filler and some sanding will have the rear wheel arch ready for painting.