Stagea update - Prototyping the rear lip. (Patreon)

So before I drop the video either tonight or tomorrow, here is the latest update on the Stagea.

In order to finish off the kit and have everything look like it works together, this car has been needing a rear lip / rear diffuser, whatever you want to call it. The main thing it needed was to bring the bottom edge of the rear bumper down by about 30mm to match the same drop I added to the sideskirt.So to try and change things up, rather than me build this from scratch on the car, I actually took a scan of the rear bumper using the 3D scanner from Revopoint and sent it over to my good mate Stan and we went back and forth while putting together a design fully in CAD.

I kinda wanted to test and see just how little I could get away with this part. So like my fenders that I made, I decided rather than printing a plug and trying to make a mould off that before it warps, I'd just print the moulds. Last time with the front fenders, I sanded all the moulds down and tried to get most of the layer lines out of the print itself before priming. This time I didn't even prep the plastic at all and just went straight into body filler.

The body filler got sanded with 40 grit and then some 80 grit over that to smooth out the rougher areas. I definitely didn't bother taking the whole plastic surface to 120 or 240 before I applied the primer.

The primer was my regular 2 part filler primer. I didn't waste my time with the polyester sealers that I've been using on my plugs up till now.For sanding I went for just 2 passes with the DA, one with 240 grit disks and one with 600 grit. After that I jumped all the way to wetsanding with 1500 grit and polished with a heavy cut polishing compound.This is much more than I'd normally do but because this is just a one time use mould, it didn't need to be perfect and if some 240 grit scratches still showed through the gelcoat of the finished part it wasn't going to matter. Especially since the next step of the process was to apply a thick coat of wax and without buffing it off, spray on a few coats of PVA.

Moment of truth, getting the part out of the mould and seeing if the release agent did it's job along with all my poor prepwork on the filler and primer underneath actually stayed in place.

It honestly came out easier than probably any other part on this car, and there was no signs of any issue at all with the mould, honestly I could probably get a few more pulls out of this mould if I wanted to. So it's good to know that I've been needlessly overcomplicating things for a while and that with these quick and dirty moulds, you really don't need to do much. Next time I might even try skipping the wetsanding and polishing step and just go straight from DA sanded 600 grit / grey scotchbrite finish to wax and PVA.After popping the rear lip out of the mould I gave it a trim and did a quick test fit and got the first look at the car with the almost finished parts on it.

The lip came out pretty much exactly as I'd hoped. There were a few things that we knew we'd only be able to get a feel for once it was on the car and we could see it all together, so there are definitely a few small changes for me to make to it before I can pull final moulds off it and finish up this kit for good.But for now, bloody stoked mate.And to add in a quick refresher of where we're heading, this is a render I did a while back showing how the new lip will tie the sideskirts in and also toying with a possible roof spoiler.