12.11.2019 - Ready for Paint

Finally getting my hands on the hood I found myself out of reasons to procrastinate getting the car painted. I had been hunting for almost a year to find a body shop to paint the car. After getting run arounds, empty promises, and people dropping the ball, I was at a loss. One day I was talking to my cousin and his friend who both have C6 Z06s and they recommended a place right up the road from my house. It was a shop who does a lot of work for the Z06 crowd and is familiar with all the different composite body panels. I gave them a call and showed up the next day with the car. We talked at length about what I wanted and I walked him through the laundry list I had. It was the end of the year right at the start of the holiday season and thought he could squeeze me in within the next couple of weeks.

A quick rundown of what was going to be done on the car:

1x OEM bumper & 2x Gears lips, repair, modification, and repaint
1x OEM bumper & 3x OEM lips
Front fender edges cleaned up
Hood painted with exposed carbon on the bottom, blacked out grill, and the lip on the underside body colored.

I had the car torn down as much as I could for them to make it as easy as possible. Windshield cowl was removed, intake pulled (I'll get to that later),

In an earlier post I made a reference to how the Gears lip mounts. I was unhappy with the original solution and decided that since I was never going to be selling these parts I was going to modify them so I didn't ever have to deal with those rickety mounting tabs. After planing out several different solutions we ended up landing on removing the tabs, and fiberglassing the edge where the tab was flat so it had a more OEM look. From there studs were fiber glassed into the back of the lip, and the OEM bumper was slotted to accept the studs. Now the two edges of the lip would mount in a similar way as the OEM CR lip does against the vertical portion of the OEM bumper.

For the hood the body shop ended up calling me at some point to discuss the underside. The dry carbon is textured and it makes it very difficult to tape a clean edge for the body color line. The solution that we ended up with was to have a guy who does pinstriping for hot rods come out and run a bead of black around the whole inner edge of the hood. This worked perfectly, and ended up framing the exposed carbon so much better than I expected. You don't even notice it's there unless I point it out.





















All in all it took way longer than the two weeks they initially quoted, but it got done. I think it was sometime mid-February before I had all the parts completed and back in my hands. Initially they delivered the car with the modified OEM bumper and the Gears lip. Needless to say when I pulled in to pick the car up I was blown away. It turned out even better than expected. The only thing that stood out to me was all the extra compound in all the cracks, and and all the dust all over but that's pretty normal for a body shop. Notice how well the lip fits against the bumper. It's tight all the way around, and in these pics it's only held on by the new studs on each corner.

 

What were the differences you noticed between the FRP and dry carbon hoods?

 

The new front end looks great @Feezy ! I've followed this build for a long time, love it.

 

Very excellent dude.

 

Uggghhhh! So jelly! I've got that "popular" version of the gears lip and the fitment is so bad I've yet to put it on despite having had it for 3 years now! Every time I go to work on it I just lose enthusiasm for it.

I know you said never but never say never! Dibs on when you sell either one of the Gears lips!

The hood looked great unpainted but the car looks even better with it painted, nice choice!

 

Thanks homie!

It's funny, RSG was very vocal about how poorly fitting the original Gears lip was and that's why they "chose" not to replicate one. I think the pictures of mine against the bumper compared to the multitude of pictures I've seen of their version handing off of bumpers with 1/2in or larger gaps speak louder than I ever could. To be fair, I've also seen some RSG lips fit well and look good. SHG Mikes car looked phenomenal with it. It's a good looking piece, but it's just not a Gears lip like they claim it to be. That's the thing that I hate most. They put in the effort to build something from scratch and bring something new to market, but instead of calling The RSG lip they called it something that it's clearly not to cash on on the hype and sell it to uneducated buyers. It doesn't help that all of their marketing photos use old pictures of cars with real Gears lips rather than their own product.

I'll let you know if I ever part with them, but I'll be honest, I doubt it's going to happen. I've got a long list of people who have asked to be notified, and quite honestly I don't see anyone ever willing to pay anywhere close to the amount that I've uink into obtaining, restoring, shipping, and modifying them. Not only that but you'll have to slot your OEM bumper to fit due to the new mounting studs that I had added. (I'll show more pics of this in a few posts)

The dry carbon version is better in almost every way. It's lighter, it's more rigid, and fits better. The downside is its exorbitant price. On my FRP the driver side that bolts to the hinge was a bit tall. There is no way to adjust that down, it was just a bit to thick. The FRP hood was also very flimsy. I assume that it's due to the fact that it was the same structural shape as the carbon version and FRP just isn't as strong of a material. If you supported the hood from one side the other side drooped quite a bit. (This is why I was working on a fancy hinge prop set up for both sides) The FRP hood wasn't strong enough to work with gas filled shocks. I tried them with the SOS damped and then custom ordered a set of low pressure gas shocks and they were still to strong for the hood for me to be comfortable.

It's probably worth mentioning that my old FRP hood was different than the current round of FRP hoods. It was probably insignificant, but the new batch of FRP hoods have a slightly different shape to the cut out area for the Mugen intake relief and a really shitty grill that's just a big flat piece of mesh where mine was form fitted to the shape of the vent. They are also still flimsy. If you look around you can clearly see how much they sag when propped up from one side. Maybe it matters. maybe it doesn't, but I wasn't happy with it and chose to upgrade. There is also another version now that's FRP with a layer of carbon on the top half of the hood. I don't know how structural that carbon is and I've only seen one person who has it (Pboi on Instagram). It might be worth reaching out to him about it if you're interested.

 

Great updates, keep them coming!

 

Without a doubt my favorite NFR ever.

I also wish my CE28's were the same size, so a little jealous

 

02.13.2020 - Painted OEM Lip

Couple of months later I got a call that my OEM bumper and the lip were ready, but they were still working on the spares. From what I remember I had a few very small touch ups that I wanted them to address on the very edge of one of the fenders so I took the Gears set up off and dropped the car off again. That way they could fix the issue, install the bumper, and I could drive it home without running the risk of damaging the fresh paint transporting it in my Fit.












04.23.2020 - Paint Repair

Fast forward a couple of months, the car has been sitting in my garage. You could smell that there was fresh paint in the garage. It was starting to get warm here in Arizona so I had the car backed into the garage and would open it and let the front end sit in the sun during the day. I let the car cure for over three months before I scheduled an appointment for clear bra. Unfortunately one day prepping everything to be cleaned and polished for clear bra I noticed that the tape line on the bumper that used to be yellow (Gears bumper) was done incredibly poorly. I took a bunch of pictures to document the issue, but decided to handle correcting it myself. I was on a timeline and didn't want to deal with repainting the entire bumper again for something that I felt I could address myself.







The area where the lower grill and the bumpers paint color meet was a mess all the way across. Not only was there over spray, the line wasn't even, and whoever touched it up by hand did a piss poor job. I started by using some compound, a microfiber sponge, and a lot of pressure and began working the bad touch up off so I could see what I was dealing with. Once I had all the touch up removed I cleaned and degreased everything, and began painstakingly touching it up by hand. I had initially started trying to tape the entire line, but after a few attempts I couldn't get the tape to follow the line I wanted so I decided it was best to free hand it. I was able to remove most of the over spray with a combination of polish, clay, and thinner. I ended up using some Berlina Black touch up paint I had laying around and got to work. I ordered some very small disposable applicators and thinned the paint a bit so it would lay even. I ended up putting probably 6-10 coats of touch up over a week or two.







The final results came out better than I expected. From six inches away you have to really be looking to see that there was a blemish there at all, and from standing distance it is completely invisible. Every time I try my hand at a correction or restoration like this I am completely blown away by the results. It's pretty impressive what you are capable of doing with a bit of planning and patience.







All in all I was pretty pleased with my paint shop. This problem, although major in my opinion, was resolved, and I really didn't have many other issues other than them taking months longer than they expected. The quality of the spray and the match on the car are incredible. You can't tell what was painted and what wasn't, and at the end of the day that was far and away the most important factor to me. I've seen lots of cars with mismatched paint, or various shades off of the original color and that was completely unacceptable for what I wanted.

 

02.26.2020 - Mugen Intake

In preparation for the TODA ITBs I picked up a Mugen Intake. I was debating between the Mugen or the J's and at the end of the day the lung chamber on the J's doesn't line up properly with the TODA box. After getting to see a couple of J's intakes in person the Mugen blow it away quality wise, and you don't have to drill into the visible portion of the radiator support to mount it. Also with the Amuse hood I no longer had to worry about clearance for the intake. It give more noise than you would expect for something that completely encloses the filter.