Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

I am currently restoring my 1973 Plus 2 130/5. The car was originally Tawny brown and was resprayed in lagoon blue in the early 1980's. The car has been stored in a dry garage since 1992, only covering 500 miles in that time, always in the dry. The last time it was driven was in 2005. There are no gel cracks, crazing or starring of the paint but the finish is showing its age with scuff marks etc, and I have had a slight accident in the garage and damaged a small area therefore I am going to respray the car.
Nearly all of the previous posts I have read talk about removing the paint back to the gel coat but with there being no issues with crazing, cracking or starring I am loath to introduce the chance of contaminating the fibreglass base by removing all of the paint. I am inclined to 'deglaze' the paint with 1500 grade dry production paper then spray filler, rub down again then topcoat & clearcoat in cellulose.
Has anyone resprayed their car or part of without removing the sound existing paint,
thanks,
Mick

Hi Mick
have you tried to clean up,t-cut and polish an area of the car and see how it comes up?If it looks good you could then just get some local repairs done.There are a lot more knowledgable on this site than me but if the car was sprayed in the early 80's it could be cellulose which would probably require a lot more work than if it was 2K
good luck
Paul

Why not try a professional polish and local repair first - shouldn't cost much.

I'm finishing up a back to glass 67 ?lan that had been re-sprayed when I bought it in 72 and it immediately showed all the cracks, so I went back to glass on it. A +2 that I've finished went back to glass but I don't think I needed to. I've read since then that the +2 bodywork is less likely to show crazing and I think I could've just fixed up areas on the +2 but done more than a deglazingsince it had like three coats of paint and the primers, so you can get to where there's just too much paint on the car, but with only one respray it'd probably be OK for a third. However, without any really bad places in the paint, I would just repair those areas and touch them up and and see how that works and then if it's not OK do a respray, but as the others have said, you might be able to really get that back in good shape without going overall. Gordon Sauer

Thanks for the replies. I thought about a touch up and polish but the closer I look the more little marks I see that have accumulated over the years of storage. That and the fact it's metallic finish which I have found in the past doesn't touch in well I am determined to do an all over spray, except the roof which is silver metallic in good condition. I will do the spraying myself and post pictures when complete,
Mick

With out seeing the car it's really hard to know the right route but personally I'd also be trying the polish touch up route.

My car has had a couple of spray over the top paint jobs in it's time and they really haven't lasted well. It has all sorts of very bad cases of paint issues (flaking, extremely bad orange peel, cracking). I pretty confident the original paint is in much better condition than the re-spray paint. So my view tends to be you either live with what you have or too a very high quality repaint, otherwise in a few years the new paint could be much be worse than the current. (I may be just be biased by a particularly badly done re-sale red paint job or two thou....)