Custom 1-piece Lower Door Panel

This is a door panel a co-worker and I started on a few months back. The project has since been put on hold for various reason. Hopefully this basic "How-To" will help some people that would like to make a 1-piece custom door panel.  Some of the pictures have been misplaced somehow, but if you've already read through the other How To's I've done, you'll follow along just fine.

For starters, we drilled a ton of 1/8" holes all over the door panel in the area we wanted to add our fiberglass addition to. By doing this, when we resin the door panel, the resin will go through the holes, and create a strong "grommet" like adhesion to the door, much stronger and less likely to break off than if we had just laid fiberglass on top of the door panel.  By only doing that, it would be easy to simply flex the door panel slightly, and peel the whole piece right off! (see bottom of this page) But by using this grommet method, it is MUCH STRONGER, and permanant.

We then layed 1" wide strips of matting on the holes we drilled, and resined them to the door panel

After wetting them out and applying. We made sure they were wet enough to drip through to the other side.

While the front was still tacky, we did the same to the back side, so that it had a good layer of matting
of BOTH sides of the door panel, stuck together by the resin grommet.

Again, backside was saturated to make a good seal with the front.

Once finished, this is what we ended up with. A rough, but very securely attached base layer of fiberglass to
attach our fleece to without worrying about it peeling off the door panel.

Few pics missing here....

After mounting our trim ring, and outline for the crossover, we stretched the fleece over the entire piece
and super glued it to our fiberglass base.  Then we resined the fleece to the door panel

We scuffed it down, and marked out the areas using a sharpie marker as to the really low or high spots
so we'd know where to fill or sand more.

After the first layer of Rage Gold body filler was applied, we had a LOT of sanding to do.

2nd Layer, still more needed in some areas

AAAaaaahhhh, 3rd layer was charm. It's darn near ready for primer here. just a few small touch-ups need
to be done in some areas, then it goes to primer

Ready for a High-Build-Primer, then some light sanding

More pics when available

What happens when you DON'T grommet it to the door....

Before I stepped in the project, here's what happened to his first attempt.  Just as mentioned above, he laid the resin and matting directly on the scuffed door. He even had a first layer of filler on. I came in and asked how strong it was, and if it would survive a few door slams, he was confident it would.  So I 'slightly' flexed the panel, grabbed a corner and VERY EASILY peeled the whole thing off in one piece!

After that, I convinced him into the grommet method, and doing it properly. However, his first attempt was not a TOTAL loss, we decided to use it as a demo for the store.

I did a little more work on it, straightening it out and smoothing it too.  Sanded all the edges clean, and
even mounted it to a flat backboard so I could mount it on the wall.

I actually have finished this, and decided to show the four stages involved.
1. Fiberglass only
2. Fiberglass and Filler
3. Primer
4. Finished and Painted

About 4-6 inches of each stage, starting from the left moving right to the finished product.

I will try to get some pictures up here soon of my Store Demo.