To recap briefly:
- After much searching, I found a painter I was happy with both his (apparent) knowledge of fibreglass and commitment to good work, and his price - £2,500-£3,000 estimate, with a promise that it will not exceed the upper estimate.
- If anyone wants to try the same guy in the future, his name is Ray Lennon, he's near Walgrave in Northamptonshire, he has no website, but he has an email info@rlennonrepairs.co.uk and phone numbers 01604 780062 and 07736 255173
- The car has been there for 3 weeks now, he had said it'd take a month but he looks a long way from being a week off finished!
- I visited the car last week, but didn't bother with an update here, as frankly he hadn't done any more than a week previously apart from removing the bonnet.
The issue with the small (0.5"-1.5") cracks in the paint on the trailing edge of the roof goes deeper than feared. In the photos below he's just wiped the surface with some panel wipe, which makes the cracks more visible as the panel wipe takes longer to evaporate. He's taken off all the paint, and the gel coat, and the cracks are still going down into the fibreglass below. He's reluctant, and I agree, to keep sanding down until the cracks vanish, as he might end up going through almost all the fibreglass. The plan is to go down as far as he dares, then build up again with fibreglass filler, which hopefully will give it enough strength to stop the cracks coming through, at least for another decade or two.
The other thing to note here are the little white dots. These are dots of gel coat, in the fibreglass. What seems to have happened is when the fibreglass was laid into the mould there would be some air bubbles trapped. When the fibreglass was removed the gel coat will have filled in where the bubbles were. So when you sand the gel coat off, you see these little white dots where the gel coat is sitting in the bubbles. These come out quite easily with a wire brush, so he'll remove them all (from the roof at least) prior to painting. There are more at the rear edge of the roof, but they are present over most of the roof.
This picture shows the rear edge of the roof - the dark lines are the little cracks, the white dots where the gelcoat sits in the bubbles:
This picture shows the other side of the rear edge of the roof, where he's already wire-brushed through the dots of gelcoat:
And lastly one showing the front bumper removed: