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Bonded the top on with 3M panel bond. I've always had good luck with 3M products so contacted a 3M technical expert for advice on a product they make for bonding FRP. After his recommendation I also did some research on some Corvette sites looking for what they use to repair and modify their Tupperware bodied cars and some boating forums as well. There were a lot of options and all had some form of issue that required a workaround. The 3M product got good reviews but they are obviously very proud of their product as it's more expensive than others. Since this is all new to me I figure it's a crap shoot so I put my money down and rolled the dice. Hopefully it will be a winner but I won't know until after it's painted and been worked hard.
I was able to fit the front very close and won't need to dress up the inner parting line which would be very hard to sand and shape. I took great pains to ensure that the nutserts I used to attach the front were securely seated in the metal imbed. Then I also used 10ea 1/4" diameter pop rivets as a belt & suspender approach. I made sure I got complete coverage with the panel bond here.
The rear had a 1/4" gap that I had to fill by building up layers of fiberglass using vinyl ester resin until I got the gap down to ~1/8". Here I also used 5ea 1/4-20 nutserts to attach the rear section. These are the type designed for fiberglass and look very similar to the kind of drywall anchors that have expanding pedals making for a much larger contact area. Too bad there's not enough room on the front to use these as they are very solid and you'd have to break out a large portion of the fiberglass to pull them out of their mounting.
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