Paint job, pt. 1

OK, so the car’s been painted and I’m in the process of wet-sanding and buffing the paint. So, here’s how it all went down, presented over a series of several blogs.

It is illegal in California for anyone other than the fuzz to drive a car with a black-and-white paint scheme, so the auction houses usually spray the doors and roof black with cheap, rattle-can spray paint. Sometimes, they’ll only spray a black “x” on the doors! My car had a big X on the roof and carelessly spray-painted doors. Nice. Since the white paint was starting to peel off the roof, that seemed as good a place to start as any.

It turns out that all the paint on the roof was just a stiff breeze away from blowing off the car! Check out the lead picture for the blog- that’s me stripping the paint with a razor blade and blow gun!  

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All the paint on the roof ended up coming off except for a few places that weren’t in direct sunlight all day long- under where the light bar and roof decals had been. Everything else had been baked away, leaving me with a bare-steel roof. Guess this was car 418, huh?

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Paint and most primers won’t stick to bare metal, so you need to spray either an etching primer or a Direct-To-Metal (DTM) epoxy primer first. Fortunately, we had some epoxy primer from Eastwood at our shop. I scuffed the roof lightly with 220-grit paper on a Dual Action (DA) sander, masked the car, cleaned it with Prep-Sol wax and grease remover, and got to spraying.

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I used a 1.8 fluid tip in our DeVilbiss Starting Line gun (also from Eastwood) and put two light coats of primer on the roof. Nice muscle shirt!

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This stuff dries really fast, and by the time I was done cleaning the paint gun, it was ready to be unmasked. You can topcoat over this primer right away. If you wait more than 24 hours, you need to scuff the surface before painting over it.
Check out my crappy paint disaster in the next installment!