Yesterday was tinkering time again. stoneshop had been busy fitting a new (or rather, newer and sans rust and holes) mudguard to the car.
My car is a Citroen C15 which we lovingly refer to as the Paint Can, because it's often used to transport paint, but it will also carry as many as ten banana boxes of books around with no problems.
It runs on LPG, which makes it one of the cheapest possible ways to get around. So, even though it's not as young as it used to be, the Paint Can is going to be around for as long as we can manage to keep it legal and safe.
Of course, this is an older car of a French make, which means that it's prone to rust.
There's this old joke of French car makers employing very, very skilled painters, who work together in pairs, spraying the paint at each other in opposite directions so it collides in mid-air, and thus build a car without actually needing any metal in between the two coats of paint. There is some truth in that.

Removing the old mudguard exposed some problems... or rather, some challenges.
We found some holes that allowed water into one of the hollow spaces of the car. Not good. I sprayed Tectyl inside, through the holes, and onto any rust that I could see; after letting it dry, I sealed off the holes with bitumen kit and pieces of plastic cut from the top of a Chinese takeaway food container. I couldn't help singing 'Fixing a hole, where the rain gets in' while working on this.

Stoneshop also discovered that the frame the left headlight unit hangs in was badly rusted, so that it had come loose on one side, giving it more freedom to move than it ought to have. This seemed undesirable and it would probably get worse. So we decided that liquid polyesther resin would be needed to repair that. Of course, it was Sunday so we could not buy any.

So yesterday I got some from the shop nearby, and got to work.
Now I love working with polyesther resin. You mix a bit of hardener in with the Golden Syrup-like liquid, and then you can make almost anything out of it. You can pour it into a mold, or brush it onto something. If you want it to be strong, you use the fibreglass mats that come in the package as reinforcement. Entire boats can be made this way.
I cut some parts so I'd have them handy, and mixed the resin.
First, I soaked all rust that I could see, so it would be sealed off from water and air, and thus stop rotting away.
Then, I applied the pieces of fibreglass, and liberally soaked them in resin too, so they turned transparent. I used up all of the resin I had mixed and glued everything together with it.

Then it was time for tea while the resin hardened. It took about 20 minutes to harden all in all.

I think that it turned out beautifully. Today I'm going to put the headlight unit back in and see if I can put the whole thing back together again. This part of the car is probably going to outlive the rest of it!

Oh, and the new mudguard looks très shiny. Too bad it makes the rest of the car look so matte and weathered  ;-)