Gladly. I don't see any remnants on mine of the molded panel like piece that adheres to the bonnet to secure your frame. Maybe they ran out of that part or, more likely, this frame has broken off before and been crudely re-attached. Speaking of differences, is the gel coat on your bonnet grey? I have a white gel coat body and grey bonnet.
That looks about ready to fall off.
My gel-coat is clear, which is my understanding of how they came from the factory. It's a little hard to see - sort of a different look than the regular fiberglass. Maybe they used some opaque gel-coat and you got that?
I played around with the penetrating epoxy today:
It is indeed very thin, and a little bit goes a VERY long way. They say to add some acetone to allow it to penetrate even more. I used a cough-syrup cup to mix 15 ml of resin, 7.5 ml of hardener, and another 7.5 of acetone. Plus a few drops of the blue dye. I left probably half of that in the cup as waste.
Here's the front-lower side of the hood right near where the big chuck was broken away. Lots of spider cracks:
I did try following individual cracks with the syringe, and that does work pretty well. For larger areas like the above I just squirted on a bunch and then rubbed it in really hard with my gloved hand. Then after a few minutes I wiped off the excess with a paper towel.
Seemed to do the job pretty well:
If this works it's way easier than chasing each crack with a dremel tool!
I'm going to get some more epoxy dye in a contrasting color with the hope that I'll be able to see a color change on the topside cracks that I already dyed blue. Or I'll just fill them and get on with my life.
My gel coat is definitely white on the body. When I sand through the white I get to glass fibers and when I sand through the grey I get to glass fibers. So it appears there is no correlation between color of gel coat and the body parts! Very strange.
The penetrating epoxy looks effective. Maybe a second coat with little or no acetone would hold it together nicely?
In reply to TVR Scott :
So that epoxy can take care of your issues? Let me know when you're ready to do an Europa body.
In reply to Stampie :
I thought it was the Vette you wanted me to work on?
In reply to TVR Scott :
Either or ... just realized I'm getting a lot of fiberglass in my life lately.
In reply to Stampie :
Just got the itch, I guess.
Update time:
Quick note: turns out the penetrating epoxy cures to a flexible state. Not sure how I feel about that. Might try thinning regular epoxy to see if it'll wick into the cracks.
Got the driver's side wheel-well area reinforced:
Leftover tacky-tape does a really good job of pulling off old paint from tight crevices. Honestly, duct tape would probably work just a well.
I'd been stressing over the chin repair on the hood, since getting good compaction and structure there isn't easy. I had to take of my aerospace-composites-engineer hat, and embrace Sofa-King's philosophy: treat this E36 M3 like paper-mache for grown-ups!
Here's the starting point. The goal: glob it on and get the initial connection made:
The stir sticks are hot-glued in place.
This is after the initial cure. I've blocked it down with sandpaper a bit. Mostly just giving thought to the overall shape, as I build up the thickness.
Next layer went down yesterday:
I covered it with peel-ply this time, so that I wouldn't have to do quite as much bond-prep for the next layer:
And here's where I'm at this morning:
Thanks for following along!
I always love when this comes back up to the top.
Stampie said:I always love when this comes back up to the top.
Agreed! Great to keep seeing progress, that fiberglass work looks like it requires the patience of a saint, guess I'll have to stick to metal cars 
Yeah, I'm glad SOMEBODY's actually making progress. I guess I'm stalled mostly by a lack of willpower rather than any real obstacle. I should just bite the bullet and jump in to the bodywork, as you have done.. Soon, I promise!
Keep at it, Scott. This isn't the fun part of the project IMO, but you'll look back on it and be glad you did all of this work. Seeing this car running with paint on it will be amazing.
Nicely done. That is a pretty tough spot to rebuild. I'm sure it's better than new.
This is one of my favorite reads. Happy to see you're still plugging away. This forum is GREAT for vicarious living.
Thanks, guys! Always great to hear your encouragement.
So, I think I'm going to backtrack a little on this one. I did some more measuring and the new piece is installed probably 3/16" too tall. I don't think it will match properly with the original, even when body-worked.
So I'm going to cut out a lot of this and redo it. It's really not a big deal, and I'm certain I can make it match better. Stay tuned!
Great to know you’re moving forward on this awesome project!
Any update on the spider crack repairs in the fiberglass?
Something I am not looking foward to on my Europa......
Thanks for documenting all this 'glass repair. There's a lot of really practical, useful stuff here that I've never seen before (not that I've seen a bunch). I'm not sure exactly when I'll wind up working with this stuff, but I'm sure it's in the mail...
Whew! Lots of responses and questions!
Stu, good to see you chiming in! You are right in assuming that ignoring the car will not fix fiberglass problems. I've tried.
TurboFource said:Any update on the spider crack repairs in the fiberglass?
Something I am not looking foward to on my Europa......
This is still a bit of a work-in-progress. As far as I've found there are two different kinds of cracks that I'm finding:
There are small, short random cracks that look to just be the gel-coat aging. These seem to be fairly uniform in spacing and direction. I think I'll either grind these out or fill them with the penetrating resin.
The second type is the stress-cracks. These are the long, thin cracks that I've found in areas of high stress. These tend to be deeper and are often in multiple parallel groups. These are the ones that I was dremeling out all winter. As deep and compromising as they are, this is probably still the best way to go. Even though it sucks. I think these high stress areas will get a surface layer of fiberglass cloth. I don't want to just leave the old surface to crack again.
I also have been adding the carbon reinforcements to known weak areas. I think this will help quite a bit.
I've got more pics of current work, but will download and post later.
More pics of last-week's progress.
As promised, I did cut off my template piece for repositioning. I moved it down maybe 1/8".
Tied back in:
And back to fully supported:
I'll do some clean-up and reinforcement on the inside too. Not bad so far, though:
Here's the same after a bit of sanding. The shape is coming in pretty well:
I've since connected that gap, though I don't have a pic. I'm pretty much using fiberglass as bondo at this point, but it'll be way stronger and more uniform in structure.
I also filled in some of the damage on the other side. The driver's side had a pretty good hole from abrasion, though not impact damage like the passenger's.
That's all for the moment.
Looking great. The contour on that front edge is shaping up to be spot on.
I am really looking forward to seeing your plans/progress on how you rebuild the bonnet hinge system!
Dang, what a summer. Between moving my parents out of their big cluttered house and into and retirement home, and getting my oldest daughter off to her freshman year at Univ. of Vermont, my life has been stupid busy! But both those tasks are now done!
Back to some TVR work.
I've been slowly prepping for the airbox lay-up, and I made some ply templates. I intend to pre-cut the plies and then wet them out and place them like giant stickers.
I'll be able to do the whole airbox with just three different pieces. Here's the center section taped to the mold:
Slightly out of order, but here's how I traced the edge to leave a bit of overlap on the corners:
Another template here:
Next it's time to hit the mold with paste-wax and precut the vacuum bag and associated layers.
I've done a few more repairs on the hood. This weird spot was on the driver's side - looks like previously repaired damage:
Putting a light on the back side shows there's definitely a good amount of "something" in there:
I ground it down, though the light test shows there's still more. I'll do a second pass from the inside once the outside is fixed.
Ground out:
And patched:
Coolhandmoss was kind enough to share a couple pics of his hood, and that lower edge should be square and straight. Mine is not, so I added all this, and also filled four big holes on the bottom:
Yesterday I finally knocked that down to smooth:
That's it for now!
Glad to hear life is settling down enough to make TVR progress!
Stu flatter-shamed me in his thread, so I had to get off my ass and get a few things done.
First some minor stuff:
All the TVR guys were posting pics of their horrible bonnet-frames, and I took this one real quick today. The cave-man former owner of mine clearly did some repairs here:
Yup, some Home Depot engineering there. Kudos for the bird-turds holding it all together.
Another unrelated activity: I found some scrapped aerospace parts today that I grabbed from a job 10 years ago. I had forgotten that they had some 10-32 nut-plates mounted, so I spent a few minutes with a drill and punch:
MS21059 FTW!
I'll admit you have to be a pretty serious hardware nerd to appreciate these. But I am one.
On to the hood hinges. No, I'm not going to duplicate the stock frame. That 30 deg hood opening angle just doesn't do it for me.
First off, I'm adding some bulkheads to stiffen the structure and direct cooling air in the right direction. Some wood-based cad:
These will need to be trimmed out quite a bit to fit around the intercooler tubing - at least in the middle.
I wanted to do a super slick internal hinge, sort of like this:
Imagine a rod end on the end of that, pointing straight down to allow some vertical adjustment. This *might* work, but it doesn't really clear the intercooler tubes, and there's not a ton of space inside the hood for mounting arrangements.
So, I'm probably going to go sort of crude and mount a subframe below the front of hood. Something like this (binary CAD):
This is essentially the same as the hinges on the front end of my old Spitfire. This could potentially look sort of terrible, so I'm going to give a lot of thought to how to make it pretty. The whole thing could be inset flush with the hood. Or the tubes could go up at an angle and get partially inset.
Big advantage of this frame is that it offers an absolutely bomber mounting point for a front splitter, should I decide to add one. And that is floating around in my head.
So some progress on the hinge question.
That's it for now!
I like that internal hinge idea. Added bonus of that construction would be that you could add an internal stop so that the bonnet doesn't have to actually bottom out on the ground.
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