Wednesday 1 June 2011

Exhaust Heat Shield Second attempt!

You may remember me fitting a carbon exhaust heat shield back in May here

Well alas the heat of the exhaust was un gluing it from the bumper and I was lucky not to have lost in a million pieces on the motorway! A rethink was required and a new method of really, really, really sticking it to the car had to be looked at.

So I had a look at Wayside Adhesives website as I have found them to be suppliers of good quality items in the past. I settled on their Masterseal product.

It was only later that I saw there is an alternative to masterseal called masterbond, so I did the usual thing and shot myself in the foot (yet again).

Delivery was a bit slow taking a week, so adding a frustration bonus!

The main problem I had fitting the Goki Exhaust heat shield was it's warped nature. Carbon fibre is flexible I know, but as this was warped and twisted it presented me with a bit of a headache. Eventually with the use of a fair amount of duck tape I managed to strap the heat sheild to the back of the bumper and to stop fiddling I walked away!
The Master Seal does clean up with White Spirit, although I found that this would penetrate what you want to keep as well as removing what you don't want. So clean up was a pain. However you can get a very clean finish with the sealant and a steady hand. Naturally my lovely painted heat shield was looking very sorry for itself at the end of the attaching process and needed masking and painting 'on the car'.
The heat shield itself has two holes that you can use to locate with at the bottom either side of the aperture. Ideally these holes could be riveted to the bumper, however due to the warpage of the piece I just found that the rivets were under too much pressure and one ripped out of the side of the heat shield, so it was with a sigh I reached for the filler and just did away with them completely.


It sits there.. Laughing at me

Not fallen off yet!
Masking the Heat shield up was 'fun'. Ideally I would have used a scalpel to trim the tape, although typically that would require me to be organised and both my modelling knifes were 'missing in action' only to reappear after the job was complete. So I used a Stanley craft knife blade and patience to do the job. The master seal is overpaintable which is handy as it dries Matt black, it also goes a long way to covering up the fact that it isn't a perfect fit as you can see from the side views.

However I am being over critical as this is a part of the car that no one will really notice or look at!

Would I recommend you to try it? Um, no.. Well depends actually! Maybe, as it is possible to do, but it is a messy and frustrating job.

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