After banging up my wheel pants on some ice and cracking the bottom of one (for the seccond time), and popping the bottom edge of the brake caliper through the blister I had made for it - I decided it was time to do some fiberglass reconstruction. I made the blisters in both pants bigger and did some general patch work on the cracks to make them look good again. I also decided to make it easier to fix the small scratches that appear in the bottom from grass, gravel, etc that gets thrown against the bottom of the pant behind the tire. So now I needed to paint them. It's pretty cold here in Cincinnati and my wife who has the nose of a bloodhound can tell if I've been spray painting in the basement before she even gets fully in the house. So I made a poor man's paint booth that I could heat and use in my hangar to paint small things - like my wheel pants. I bought a tent from a guy on Craig's list for $10.00 and heated it with a small box heater using some aluminum dryer vent poked in through a hole in the side of the tent. The tent was pretty much held together with duct tape, but it served my purpose. I had my torpedo heater on in the hangar, which brought the temp up to around 55. The small heater blowing heat into the tent made it about 70 inside. It really worked quite well. I used an airbrush gun with a fan tip since the area to be painted was rather small and had very little overspray/fogging in the tent.
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...eat=directlink
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo...eat=directlink
The black area is just rattle can flat black and I'll sand, refinish, and re-spray these areas at annual time. The blister areas are not that obvious because they are all white and blend in. I don't know if anyone else has tried the tent booth idea before, but it worked well and I'll be looking for a good cheap bargain tent that is new to use in the future. Even in the summer it would help to keep the bugs and dust down.
Wheel Pants & Poor Man's Paint Booth
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