TVR Vixen - Painting the Chassis
When I bought this car I had looked hard for a car which didn't need major work. With this one I thought I'd found it - I'd noticed that there were some areas of the chassis that needed some paint but these were minor. I'd reckoned without the weather on this edge of the Peak District. It is an awful lot wetter than Essex where the previous owner lived and after doing a couple of thousand miles in the summer after I bought the car the areas of the chassis needing paint were rather more extensive.
 |
 |
I hadn't reckoned on the chassis paint deteriorating so rapidly. These picture were only six months apart. (In case you can't tell the difference the "before" picture is on the left.)
I thought for quite a long time before deciding to paint the whole chassis and considered waxoyling it instead. I decided that I wouldn't be happy with the results and began to plan the painting.
I started off thinking that I would wire brush the chassis and paint it from underneath the car using some epoxy paint I had read about that worked on wire brushed steel - but what an unpleasant job that would be. It wasn't long before I convinced myself that removing the body would make access to the chassis so much easier that I would save a lot of time. So with the assistance of some friends the body was removed and placed on a temporary frame with castors so that I could get it in the garage alongside the chassis.
 |
 |
 |
Then all my friends in the TVR Car Club started work on me telling me that just painting it was only half a job and that I should strip the chassis and have it blast cleaned. It wasn't long before I'd convinced myself that the time and energy to wire brush the chassis would be less than that needed to strip and reassemble it. So I stripped the chassis and had it blast cleaned.
Before the blast cleaning a friend helped me weld a couple of flaws - someone had put a self tapping screw through the body into the chassis and a weld holding the hand brake had cracked. We also modified the chassis at the front.
 |
 |
With the aid of friends three coats of epoxy paint were applied by brush. The original intention was to do two coats but I realised after the first coat of black that we would never be able to see which bits we'd done with the second coat so we did an intermediate coat of grey. It used a 750ml tin of paint for each coat but took longer than I expected - you don't realise how much there is until you start painting. I left it for a couple of weeks for the paint to harden and cleaned some of the other components - I didn't strip much of the rest as I was determined that this wasn't going to be a long project.
Reassembly went well taking only a day to get the chassis rolling with the engine gearbox and exhaust fitted with another two or three days work to get it to the stage where it was ready for the body to go back on.
 |
 |