The most important result this week is that we now have our proper red oxide coating in the boot of our 501 Sprite and can begin to next assemble all of the rear end components. If you’re unfamiliar, original Frogeyes had red oxide on the interior of the body that was then painted body color on top of that which meant that looking inside the boot you would see traces of this red oxide, particularly on the top of the boot. Our car was painted green throughout when recently restored in Australia so this was technically incorrect and we wanted to repair this and that’s a big reason why we took everything apart especially in the back end of the car.
Now that the red oxide is laid down we can layer on top all of the various fabrics and bolts that would have come later in manufacturing to make it an accurate car for the Concours Judging to come.
This was a high heart failure kind of project on such a nice car which we had already disassembled with some trepidation. Everything needed to be masked with plastic as you can see in the photos below and we need to make sure that none of the overspray would get on the beautiful green paint that adorns the body and so a tent was constructed with good ventilation so that we could shoot this red outside color into the trunk and it worked beautifully.
You might enjoy seeing a few photos of other bugeyes we had in our building which were not painted correctly in the boot but we did have one car in particular which happens to be Gumby my car from the 70s that has the weathered and faded original red oxide still in place and we were able to copy that on 50 one so that it would be accurate throughout.
