Stripping paint from Carbon Fibre

[MikeE]

Stripping paint from Caterham carbon fibre wings has been discussed on here a number of times. I've been interested in doing this for some time but no one seemed to confirm that it could be achieve satisfactorily.

 

Well now I've done it. I stripped the factory applied paint off the rear wings of my Superlight this saturday and the results (once I'd added a bit of bumper polish to them) don't look bad.

 

I achieve it by removing the wings and then just applying Nitromors Vanish and Lacquer remover (comes in a brownish orange can) to small areas at a time. Once it starts bubbling I washed the solution off with plenty of warm soapy water.

 

After a couple of coats I found that a large proportion of the wings were completely stripped back to the carbon fibre. Other areas still had a yellowish tinge from a residual layer of under coat (and strangely a small number of white areas which looked like the gel coat had discoloured). I removed this using autosol and a circlular polisher on a drill attachment (you can buy these from Halfords for around £6). Next I polished them with T-Cut and finally hand polished them with one of those back to black bumper dressings.

 

The result's not bad I reckon. Although I should add this worked on my carbon fibre but I understand Caterham have had a number of suppliers over the years so anyone undertaking this does so at their own risk (don't blame me if it goes wrong 😳).

 

I've got the rear wings back on the car now but need to find something suitable to fill the rivet holes left by the original stone guards - any ideas?

 

Also I've tried to remove the front wings (to do the same) but can't get the four alen screws holding each wing on un done (despite copious use of WD40) - anyone have any good tips here?

 

cheers,

Mike.

[SLR No.77]

Just drill out the bolts and fit new ones - go for stainless this time.

 

Have you not considered lacquering the wings? The holes could possibly be filled with a small amount of glass fibre resin containing carbon deposits - sand some off a non-visible area and add to the resin. May need to reinforce the rear of the hole first to support the resin and it will obviously need flatting afterwards,. Should leave a series of small black dots. May be better to lacquer the wings to really hide the repair job.

 

Stu.