After a long period of doing other things, I finally went and got the Citroën DS (ID20) Convertible to get it finished. The last thing I did was putting the final primer on the car. Now- the car will get a complete snad-down with P400 and then, I will spraypaint it silver metallic. First the metallic silver, and then a couple of 2K clearcoat layers.
Due to the fact that my garage is not wide enough, I will have to do the sanding and spraypainting in two phases: First the hood and left side and after that is fully cured, I will reverse the car and do the trunklid and right hand side.
Getting the car from the winter storage and sanding the FRONT and LEFT:
Still to do: Taking off the rear bumper because it’s in the way of sanding the body, lowering the rear windows and taking off the roof cover. And touching up a few imperfections: 1) At the bottom of the left rear fender, a piece of primer has come loose and 2) In the right door a small crack has appeared in the top coat at the position of the weld of the door’s lower repair part and 3) I made a dent myself on the edge of the right rear fender, barely visible but I’ll get that out.
I’ll spray paint the boulder catcher later, when I finish the right side. Then I will put the boulder catcher inside the car and take this part right away. I’ll do the same with a few other parts that need to be painted silver gray, including the rear light bar/ license plate holder and the front license plate holder.
Update 27 juni 2024: Parked the car in reverse in the garage, raised it up and bucked under it on the left side. Lowered, wheels off and then took off the rear bumper. Front Left indicator out, side mirror off and then first sanded everything with 180 grit dry contrast. After repairs and so on, I sanded all with grit 400. For my purpose, this is good enough to spray paint the car.
There are still some bumps here and there. I grinded these out down to the bare steel and filled them with fibreglass filler so that this cannot come loose from the steel.
Then flattening. For this I use a 1cm thick square wooden stick that can follow the contours of the Citroën IDS20 very well. If you hold a light under it, you can see exactly where the body still needs some flattening or thickening.
Especially at the rear, where the rear door is welded to the rear screen by the convertible builder, some work is still needed.
Where necessary, I stripped the body bare and started working on the sheet metal again.
Flatten, put the inside in rust protector and tighten the outside with a little filler, check with the stick over the contour of the car and so on.
All in all, I spent 3 full days working after which everything was tight as far as possible.
What also turned out was that the rounding of the rear screen at the bottom had a different radius than the front screen and door. I changed that by brushing a thin layer of glass fibre reinforced filler exactly in that corner with a home-made precision spatula. This made that corner the right shape right away.
Before setting this up, I roughened that whole length to the steel.
So all in all, it turned out to be a lot more work than I expected.
A lot of rough welding was done on the car during the conversion by the convertible builder, super strong and good but definitely not tightly finished.
That was also the deal at the time, so it’s no surprise that there is still a lot of work on the car. And, of course, I’m just a squealer.
I am going to spray the car on the left side as it stands. In my experience, that gives the best results in terms of coverage and evenness.
When everything has hardened completely, the wheels go on and I turn the car around so I can do the right side. After the right side is painted, I make the car ready for driving again with the rear bumper back on, but this time the extended convertible bumper comes on right away.
The original rear plate with the convertible lighting also comes back on.
The front air tunnels are finally fitted.
Then I will fit the front indicators, mount the mirrors and then the car can leave the garage.
Then I can disassemble part by part from the car and paint the inside part by part. This will be done for both front fenders and both doors.
I will then tape off the outside of the sheet metal completely so there will be no damage to it but, of course, above all, there should be no extra paint on it.