Nate Paradis' Senior Project: The Lug Nuts

During this final week of senior projects, my group and I set out to finish trying to polish the cosmetic aspects of our second car. To do this we first did a final clean and then we attempted to install the rest of the headliner and fix the pieces that we had put in previously. This was not overly successful as we tried to incorporate two different fabrics into one to make the headliner appear a little more artistic than simply a single solid color like just about all cars but ran into some problem connecting the pieces. None the less we still believe it is an improvement over the old shredded and torn brown fabric that we had to tear the rest off of the roof. As for fixing the greatly sun damaged and chipped paint all over the car we decided to paint the entire car a yellow to help cover the old paint. This did prove slightly challenging though as the yellow we chose is quite light and the original color of blue is quite dark which means that in spots the blue still shines t...

A challenging moment from this week was when we realized that using bondo to repair larger dents and body issues could actually prove quite challenging. We figured this out when we came back after a day and see that we probably should've taken some more time when applying the bondo. This is because there ended up being a good number of larger ridges that we would now have to spend lots of time on sanding down since we didn't smooth out and layer it very well in our original application to the panel. So the challenging part about this is that now we have to sand this down to a single smooth surface to ensure it look good and that has been taking quite some time as the only powered sander we have is a single small hand held radial sander, that while a little better then just using a piece of sand paper, that is in no way perfect for the job. But since we can't remove it from the body we will now have to completely sand it smooth which will take awhile as we have already put a...