Paint or not to paint - under floor pans

[leifanten]

Is the underside of the floor pans and boot floor supposed to be painted? Mine is still au naturel, but I think it would look much better in satin black.

best
Leif
1968 +2 wedgewood blue
Houston

[Fraggle]

Hi Leif.
I am in the middle of rebuilding a plus 2. The boot and underside were bare fibreglass but I have painted both with body dedener. Its like a black satin rubberised paint that also adds soundproofing qualities. It looks a lot better like this in my opinion.

Cheers,
Jason

[Jason1]

Hi Leif

We have similar cars and mine is unpainted, although I agree black would look better.

Jason

[Spyder_fan]

Leif,
Will you be adding lightness by painting the underside of the body? I’m not really teasing you by asking this as I estimate that I added about 5 kilos to my car just by using the stone chip rubberised paint in my wheel arch areas to protect the surface paint from those annoying little star cracks that can appear when small items are flicked up by the tires.

My floor pans are bare and look a bit shabby underneath with 40 odd years of road grime and oil impregnation which is quite noticeable against the 18month old still shiny Spyder chassis. I think your floor pans and underside would look really good in satin black especially if you have a neat tidy chassis to match. I can’t think of a reason not to do this and can’t imagine anyone disliking it in the future.

Regards

[leifanten]

Thanks for your responses. I take the “add lightness” argument It sounds like a bare bottom was Chapmans preference and I will probably just keep it that way

[gerrym]

Lief, there was a thin coating of wax on the underside of my car. Where I have removed this to carryout some minor repairs to the fibreglass, the gelcoat is like new.

Regards
Gerry

[richgilb]

5 kilos? Where’s the paint stripper?

[mikealdren]

My +2 had a coat of underseal which had become quite revolting over the years, largely due to the coating of oil.

I’ve scraped it all off but I am going to replace it (probably with stone-chip paint), partly for sound deadening and partly to avoid stone damage.

The floor plans are easy to clean, they’re mould side out and smoth surfaced but the wheel arches are moulded on the inside so removing the underseal is much harder.

Mike