Finished undertray after painting rests in the mold for curing

Building the undertray started with building a surface large enough to hold it. It’s larger than it looks, so we had to laminate  decorative plastic laminate onto two 4×8 foot sheets of plywood that had been trimmed to about 3×8 feet each. Then wood to form the side air dams was screwed down, and the radii filled with auto body putty. Next we cut plastic honeycomb and plywood pieces to fit, with the plywood located to pick up the attachment points on the frame and to protect the radiators on either side of the car. I built a hot-wire foam cutter from a tree saw handle, a piece of guitar wire, and an automobile battery charger, which I used to cut foam profiles for the leading edge of the floor. Then we laid the whole thing up with epoxy and two layers of fiberglass on the bottom and one on the top, and vacuum bagged the whole shebang. Vacuum bagging was made more difficult by the random tiny holes in the plastic sheeting, which we expediently fixed by adding a whole second sheet on top of the first.

After debagging we painted it and found out the hard way that you can’t paint enamel over fresh epoxy in a humid climate. It never dried, and had to be scraped off like tar. Epoxy paint worked much better. We then mounted the undertray on the car, drilling mounting points through the plywood in the correct places. We had to fabricate a mount for the front of the undertray, which was a little tricky as we didn’t want to remove the fiberglass body panel under the driver’s legs so everything had to be done from the outside. We fabricated a small pylon from aluminum sheet and pop-riveted and epoxied it to the bottom of the body.