Ok I did something quite stupid... I have a 3" cowl hood that was primered by the previous owner. Its a Cervinis so it has that white coating underneath it (which almost matches the color of my car). So, I got the bright idea to remove the ugly gray primer to get back to the original white coating...

I started with the underside of the hood using paint remover (yes paint remover!) being very careful not to leave it on long. It worked out excellent. Didnt cause any damage to the hood's coating whatsoever. Now, I got brave and decided to do the top of the hood. It seems this side of the hood had several more layers of primer on it than the underside which made the paint remover less effective. Well, needless to say I ended up eating through the coating on about a 12" x 12" portion of the hood. It looks HORRIBLE ...the coating is real ruff and theres little chips of fiberglass showing through in some spots.

My question is. How do I go about fixing this? Could I sand it down as smooth as possible and use something like Bondo to coat over it? How can I get the rest of the paint off without scuffing up or otherwise damaging the original coating? I'm a total moron when it comes to body work (obviously) but I'd really really like to use this hood rather than buy another one.

Thanks,
Chris

 

It sounds like you stripped the jel coat off. I don’t know a lot about glass yet, so I’m going to start speculating.

I'm not sure what kind of stripper you used and what it would do to a polyester/epoxy resin, but it's possible that your hood could deteriorate some if the stuff did work it's way into the resin. I would let it sit for a 3-4 days or so in a garage to see what happens. If nothing happens, you can either apply another jel coat or use a fiberglass specific filler on it.