Hudson Auto Films bought the Nova a year ago, a strange 1980s concept car that sat abandoned in undergrowth for decades. The team has been rebuilding it ever since, with new metal, new parts, and a turbocharged Alfa Romeo race engine planned.

Progress stalled for weeks while the crew tackled the fiberglass body shell. The latest video finally shows what that work actually looked like, roughly 10 weeks of grinding, repetitive labor, most of which barely shows on camera.

The Nova started life in the UK in the early 1970s as a Volkswagen Beetle–based kit car with a fiberglass body and a one-piece canopy that flipped forward instead of using conventional doors. Licensed versions sold around the world under different names, and in the United States the design was marketed as the Sterling and later the Sterling Sebring, which kept the same basic canopy shape but adapted the body for American buyers and regulations.

Fiberglass does not rust, but decades of neglect had left the Nova's shell cracked, pitted, and full of old repairs that flattened its once-sharp body lines. The crew packed fiberglass bridging filler into the damaged panels, then used a long sanding block to find high and low spots across the surface.

One attempt at repairing the front end failed outright when filler would not set, likely from an old batch of hardener. Hudson had to scrape off the soft mix and start over. That cost hours on top of weeks already spent filling and sanding the same panels.

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