[rbgray1]

Hello CR Forum members,

I built a CR 1 back in 1990 and am currently going through a complete update and rebuild.

The reason for my post is trying to be a good contributing member to our community and extend an offer of technical help for those of you that get involved in repairs or builds of the fiberglass body shell and various glass composite parts on our cars.

You may have seen some other posts I've made on the forum and I'd like to offer some tech advise to complete the body or repair the body for any of you that may have questions.

My credentials: 8 years as a body repair master tech in the collision repair market in a large repair center in Chicago, then 25 years as technical, sales, and marketing director with a major Automotive Coatings manufacturer, and the last 5 years as an Executive with Evercoat, the market leader in Body Filler, putty, Gelcoat and fiberglass resin systems.

I may be able to assist you with questions regarding best practices of fiberglass repair work and the interactions you may have with your final auto paint finishing. I may be able to answer most of your questions from our extensive technical testing, both in Fiberglass and my experience and contacts in the Automotive Coatings segment. If I don't know the answer to one of your questions, I won't guess, but I will seek feedback from our technical development team and try to provide you solutions to your questions.

The overall goal is to provide you with the best products and procedures to conduct fiberglass or coating solutions that will last the life of your car, that don't exhibit shrinkage or coatings failure, and provide a long lasting vehicle that stands the test of time. I frequently read on other forums various recommendations that are very suspect in long term performance, and cringe. The internet is loaded with so much disinformation, bad advice and bad you tube videos that I felt the need to offer our CR forum members assistance straight from product manufacturers that serve the automotive industry, and provide technical advice based on techincal development, industry standard practices, and long term performance.

I will also convey that even though I'm currently rebuilding my own 26 year old CR1 build, the body work looks excellent, exhibits only wear and tear you'd expect from a vehicle with 30000 miles, and some minor stone chipping in the normal areas.

In closing, all of you that are active forum members have been a wealth of feedback to me over the last few months as I've been researching the various upgrades that I want to perform on my own car. I frequently review the archive posts that are pertinent to my plans, have interacted with some of you directly, and really wanted to, in return, be a good contributing member to all of our CR forum community.

Please don't think I'm trying to sell anything or being arrogant to say that I know everything. I only want to offer my 38 years of experience in the automotive repair, coatings and composite industry that are all directly pertinent to all of our love for these cars.

Respectfully,

rbgray1