I've been working with a customer at work to tune his car, which is an R8 V10 coupe with a custom made twin turbo kit he built himself. I've been working with him since I think April, and about a month ago his car was finally done and ready to be dropped off for tuning. I go in and open the shop at 9am on a Sunday, expecting him to show up in a truck and trailer that he transported the car in and stayed overnight. 9am rolls around and a silver R8 rolls up. I point him into the shop and see there's no rear bumper on the car, exposing the turbos and exhaust.
"Did you leave the truck at the hotel?" I asked. "No, I decided to drive it over (from LA) like this. I just took it easy." 10 minutes later he showed me the kit, which was beautifully made. Hard lines everywhere, flawless fit and finish, top quality components, no corners cut at all. I come to learn he is a professional fabricator, heavily involved in the SoCal hot rod industry. He does a bunch of stuff with shops like Nelson Racing Engines, working on show cars like their Maximus Charger, which his shop was largely responsible for the bodywork on (it is a custom metal-finished widebody in bare steel--no filler or paintwork on the entire car). Pretty damn cool guy to know.
Anyways, we get to work tuning his car this past week. Ends up putting down just over 700whp on 91 octane at just under 6psi on the stock motor. Full boost around 3500rpm, peak torque from 3800-6500rpm, and incredible top end power. The car is so smooth and so fast, and sounds unbelievably good at full chat and high RPM. One of my favorite projects to be involved in.
Anyways, in the process of chatting pretty frequently for the past few weeks his car has been in my hands, I bring up what I've got going on with the Audi. I showed him some pictures of that shitty rear panel, and his thoughts were 'yeah, that should be an easy fix, won't take long at all if you want help'. I appreciated it, but I also felt like a noob, having previously resigned to it being a quagmire to get involved in. I decided to give it another shot this week, and I'm glad I did.
I probably have 3-5 hours in to this, working the metal and looking at the damage to figure out how to work it. With a better understanding of what was wrong with the panel and what needed to happen to fix it, I methodically went through it working from the outside in, and fixed it. There are still some gouges and minor wavy spots near the middle where it had gotten hacked on in its previous life (see all the dark spots near the middle), and the bodyline at the bottom is not as crisply defined all the way across as it was originally, but this went from a rusty hack pavejob, to being doable with plenty of filler, to hopefully only requiring a well-sanded skim coat. Once I gave it a solid effort and got the hang of how things work, it was actually a pretty neat thing to do and I'm sure will definitely be a valuable skill in the future. Having started filler work elsewhere on the car, metal finishing is a much quicker and cleaner process when possible than using filler is.
I got the rear panel, a couple minor dents on the sides, and some rock dents on the hood in filler, and the smaller stuff is all sanded. I have to finish the hood, and tackle the rear panel. The next step after that is to pull the window trim and windows, and sand the roof down. Then it's time for epoxy, which has to be quickly followed with 2K primer. Lots of sanding then, and finally time for final paint and reassembly. Four weekends left until BBQ...
Sam
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