At this age sometimes it just stops working...

Here's a brief side note in our hood repairing saga.  I've been going on and on about how you have to do things right when fixing fiberglass.  It's not hard to do, but it is easy to mess up little things and have problems down the road.  This is one of those little things.  It's not uncommon to see Gen I and II Vipers with bubbles in the paint, even on cars that have never been wrecked or repainted.  They look just like rust bubbles would on a steel car.  My car is no exception, two places on the hood had these bubbles.  They're easy to see when you're looking at the car, but very hard to photograph in 2D.  To make the bubble stand out, I lightly sanded over it so you can see it clearly.

Then I started sanding down into it with my DA.  Even though my hood has been repainted several times, it wasn't re-work that caused this bubble.  It goes all the way down to the fiberglass.  The original factory primer lost adhesion to the fiberglass.  A large chunk of it was no longer stuck down, and that's what caused the bubble.  It's also why some cars have bubbles when the body is hot but they seem to disappear again when the body cools down, the loose paint gets hot and expands more than the fiberglass beneath it.

It just goes to show that even the experts can sometimes have trouble getting everything to work right with fiberglass.

Next!

Just a little update because I'm so far behind on my posting.  Continuing my theme of smallest to biggest, I fixed some more cracks on the Vipers hood.  Same process as the last ones and like all the others they looked like tiny imperfections until I started grinding into them.  Same location too, the corners of the hood scoop hole create stress points where cracks will start if flexed enough.  You can so see that I've got a tarp laid out under the hood.  It's there to keep most of the dust out of the engine compartment, and catch any drips of fiberglass resin or Bondo.  For the time being, I'm also not worried about fiberglassing over the paint.  Normally that's a huge no-no, but the whole area will be sanded down to bare fiberglass before the bodywork is completed, and none of the paint overlapped areas will still be there once that's done.