I modified the front wheel well outlets which required me to cut the stock body line on the doors which are several inches below the nose parting line (i.e., the line that separates the nose and body).
Left door cut to remove the stock body line that is aligned with the top of the front wheel outlet, the fiberglass was appropriately thick in this area
The holes in the doors have been patched and a clean body line has been created and blended into the doors.
When Allan first picked up one of the doors he said, “you got a bad doors.” He knew by the weight that the fiberglass was much thinner than it should be. To demonstrate, he turned off the lights and shone a flashlight on the gelcoat side. Large sections of the door weren’t much more than gelcoat. It’s understandable that there might be some thin spots, but both doors were shoddy and the nose and tail have similar issues. This really pisses me off. It would have taken the fiberglass terrorist with the chop gun what, two extra minutes? In addition, the fiberglass on the nose, center section and tail wasn’t rolled out. Whomever glued the interior shell should have noticed how thin the door was and they could have easily laminated a few layers of chopped mat. But no, they just bonded them together and shipped it.
Fixing this after the fact is several orders of magnitude more work than to do it right the first place because there is only a small opening in the interior shell to access the backside of the door. Not as bad as building a ship in a bottle, but you get the point. You have reach through the opening and apply dewaxer, abrade with 40-grit sandpaper and then apply multiple layers of cloth. The good news is that Allan has had to do this before and this is one of the first things that he checks when he gets a SL-C. Apparently the quality of the SL-C bodies have gotten much worst over time so it’s critical that you check your fiberglass before doing any bodywork. Put the pieces on sawhorses, turn off the lights and have someone slowly move a flashlight across the gelcoat.
As you can see in the picture above, Allan also has a GT-R in the shop and I compared the quality of the fiberglass. The GT-R fiberglass was really nice and made my SL-C body look shoddy. That said, I prefer the SL-C. This isn’t about the molds. The subcontractor who makes the GT-R bodies does a high-quality job whereas the one who makes the SL-C bodies doesn’t. The issues are fixable, but it’s not something that a builder should need to do. The fiberglass parts are incongruous with the quality found in the rest of the parts.