Small little update on Derrick’s car… It’s still on its way but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Even though there are dates that he’d like to meet, sometimes it just doesn’t work out – due to certain road blocks or making sure everything is right before moving forward again. A lot more time was spent trying to perfect the paint as much as we can before doing any final polishing. There’s still a bit or orange peel and all that can really be done about it is just manual wet sanding and checking. Eventually you get rid of it, but it’s extremely tedious, like I mentioned before…

A little more was finished and Anthony finally went through most of the car with his rotary and some aggressive cutting polish. It’s really starting to look good now that the paint is clearing up and is feeling more and more proper. Still something to look forward to when it’s finally down and out and about! I know that Derrick is getting super anxious and sort of tired of working on the car and I can totally understand, but just a little while longer and it’ll be done before he knows it.

Dash fitting finally going in. Derrick started slowly putting pieces of the interior back and while it’s generally pretty simple… Sometimes it’s more difficult to put things back in than it is to take it out.

Anthony working in the polish on the rear quarter. You can start to see it looking more and more shiny.

Here you can see Anthony did about 1/4 of the bumper. It turned out really nice with the gold flake and all.

The driver side with the first pass of the polish.

Dash and cluster pretty much in.

Rear seat belts bolted in. Super easy.

Both main seat belts in. Again – super easy.

One of the main roadblocks that we ran into was running the trunk actuator and the rear defrost wires through the hatch. It’s such a narrow opening that it was extremely difficult to get a bunch of plugs through the opening and when we finally got it, the rubber grommet didn’t want to come through either. Derrick finally decided to cut the wires, run them and the solder them back together. That way he could get the rubber grommet on to prevent water from coming into the car and we would be wrecking any plugs or ripping any wires.

A shot of one of the wheels. These wheels have been giving him a headache over the past few weeks. Punit – the original owner of them had them powder coated a teal colour and then they were passed onto Adam for his EK and finally over to Derrick. When Derrick got them, his plan was to revert them back to the polished colour. Little did he know that it wasn’t so simple to take off the powder coating. He tried everything from aircraft grade paint stripper to sand blasting them himself and even using a dremel with a sanding disc and even then, the powder coat didn’t come off completely. His only option at this point is to bring them to the shop for them to sand blast professionally.

For now, he’s sprayed plasti-dip on it with paint on top to just cover over their work until they can get it done properly. It doesn’t look too bad and for now, it’ll have to do.

Anthony’s first pass on the bumper. Looking awesome.

A closer shot. I decreased the exposure so you could see more of the flake.

Things getting dusty from the polish. Got a lot of cleaning to do when this is all over.

Some rear panels in. This was the last shot I took before leaving, but I hope that Derrick is able to make some good strides in the following days and finally gets it running by the weekend… I’ll try my best to keep you guys updated with his progress.

Slow and steady wins the race!