Andy has been making mighty progress on the Traveller
You might have been wondering how the Traveller restoration was going as I haven’t provided an update recently. Well, the answer is there has been lots of preparation ongoing over the past few months. In fact, lots and lots, because as you might have read in these pages before, this car has had a great deal of welding. This was mostly underneath, granted – but major reconstruction around the bulkhead/inner wings and gutters was in a visible part of the car, so it needed to have a good finish.
With the old paint stripped and cleaned off and the bare metal sanded back, the next stage was to fill and smooth any minor depressions, panel-beat any high spots, and generally work slowly around the car (bearing in mind this is really only the front end) to get everything straight. After many weeks we had got it good enough to apply a coat of epoxy primer. I worked on each of the panels and parts that needed to be painted and got them all to the same stage, i.e. wearing a coat of epoxy – then we returned to the main shell.
We rubbed everything down with 240-grit paper and immediately found a few more imperfections. The worst of these was on the roof where new metal had been welded in, and around the gutters on both sides, which had also been replaced. Time for more filler, more tapping, more rubbing down etc. It was a painstaking process, but my son Sam really enjoys this work so he took the lead, and slowly, little by little, we finally reached the point where he was happy with the shell... and where we had no fingerprints left.
The cab roof on the left-hand side was problematic. We could get it almost right, but almost was not quite good enough, so we must have repeated that area about eight times before it was finally right. At this point, it was finally time to apply some more paint and on went three coats o
