Being made of fibreglass, the body on a Reliant Regal does not rust, but that does not mean it is indestructible. There were three main areas of physical damage on our car that needed to be repaired, plus a couple more places that we had inadvertently cracked when removing the body from the chassis and which now needed to be repaired and reinforced. Stripping the paint off also revealed a couple more minor issues, such as on the passenger door whose fibreglass skin was cracked where the front of the door handle attached – we put some fibreglass matting behind any areas such as this to reinforce them.
Making the fibreglass repairs was generally very simple in comparison to stripping off the old paint, which is somewhat ironic given how little paint there was still clinging to the body! Some flat areas could be cleaned back with a DA sander, but most of it had to be laboriously scraped off using a variety of flat-bladed hand tools. This revealed numerous places where the fibreglass had small holes or the gel coat was worn
