The Car is Painted!

 

The Car is Painted!

I have been looking forward to this post for the last two-and-one-half years.  The repair and painting of the body is certainly the longest part of the restoration process.  It has been a huge and often discouraging job but now it is done and the project can move to new stages.

At the end of the last post, back in October, the body was in final primer and the bonnet had been disassembled and the parts primed and the painting started.  All of the inside surfaces of the bonnet were painted in my temporary booth set up inside the garage.  This was not a perfect solution as dust got in in spite of the fan running and overspray got out through leaks in the plastic sides of the booth.  But it was warm and reasonably clean and better than spraying out in the driveway. 

While the bonnet was off the car and the front frames removed it was possible to paint the interior of the car and the firewall.  Sanding all the complex interior corners and the firewall was a tedious job done mostly with the fingertips.  The interior I sanded mostly dry to avoid filling all the cracks and corners with water, and with 400 grit paper as almost all of the interior will be covered with upholstery or carpet, so the paint will not show, the door jams being the only area that will show on the finished car.  The area around the spare tire in the boot will also show and that was very difficult to paint because when you paint inside a hole like the boot the paint blows back at you instead of coating the walls.  I might try to re-spray that area before starting final assembly of the car.

Interior of the car and firewall painted at home in temporary booth.

View of painted interior through boot opening.

The next step was to weld the new foot wells into the floors.  This I proposed to do with the car upside-down on the rotisserie so I could make the plug welds from the bottom instead of trying to make them awkwardly squeezed into the interior of the car. 

 

With the firewall painted the rotisserie bracket was re-attached to the firewall so the body could be turned over to weld in the new footwells and paint the bottom.

 

Right side floor with new footwell Cleco’d in place, ready to weld.

After allowing the firewall paint a few days to dry while I was working on reassembling the painted bonnet parts, I re-installed the rotisserie bracket to the firewall and hung the car once again on the rotisserie so I could weld in the footwells and then paint the bottom of the car.  Before turning the car over I cleaned the paint off the edges of the footwells and set them in place.  I drilled 6, one-eighth-inch holes in each footwell and continued these holes through the floor of the car to allow me to use Cleco aircraft fasteners to hold the footwells in place for welding when the car was upside down.  I then removed the footwells and turned the car upside down and drilled 5/16-inch holes through the floor for plug welds.  As the flanges on the new footwells were fairly narrow, some of the holes in the body floor necessarily cut through the edge of the floor, making the plug welds in those holes more difficult.  There were 49 holes on one side and 51 holes on the other, making a total of 100 welds holding in the new footwells.

 

Right side footwell welded in with 49 plug welds.

Both footwells welded in, primed, and seam sealed inside and outside.

After completing the 100 plug welds the welds had to be ground smooth.  This was done with a combination of pneumatic cut-off tool with two disks and an electric 5-inch angle grinder.  Both tools were noisy and required a lot of time and patient work.  With the grinding done the footwells were primed then sealed with seam sealer on both sides to prevent air and water coming through the plug-welded joints.  With a little finish sanding the bottom was now ready for paint. 

Here again the rotisserie made this job possible.  I don’t know how you could paint the bottom of a car without turning it over.  It would be impossible for me to spray paint laying on my back, and the paint gun would not like working in a pointing-straight-up orientation – all the paint would run out of the gun.  So the rotisserie is worth all the trouble and effort it was to build.

Bottom of the car painted, on the rotisserie, in the temporary booth.  Notice the reflection of my son, Enoch, standing in the booth admiring the paint!

Ever since sandblasting the body, every time I rotate it on the rotisserie sand keeps coming out of holes on the inside panels.  It is impossible to get all the sand out!  What I did not realize was that sand comes out through holes in the bottom of the car as well!  I learned this when I rotated the car to paint all the bottom surfaces and sand fell out on the wet paint!  I couldn’t do anything at the time this happened but after the paint had dried (clearcoat in this case) I sanded the sand out and touched up the clear with a brush.  This resulted in a satisfactory repair even though if you look closely you can see that a repair has been made.  It will be hard to see with the car on the ground.

While the car was upside down I installed the newly-painted heat shield that goes between the mufflers and the bottom of the car.  This was another task that I did not want to do lying on my back!

Newly painted bottom with black painted heat shield rivetted in place.

The next job was to get the car off the rotisserie so I could re-assemble the painted front frame and re-fit the bonnet.  With the frame re-assembled and the bonnet also re-assembled I knew things would not line up as they had when I did the body work on the body and bonnet. 

This time I was assembling the front frame for the final time so I put in all the correct fasteners and also mounted the front sway bar and the steering rack-and-pinion unit because these use the same screws that hold the frame together.  The same is true for the upper A-arm mounts.  I had to clean these and zinc plate them because I had failed to send them to the plater when I did the lower A-arm mounts.  Another lesson that will not be lost on me if I ever do another one of these cars!

Final assembly of front space frames, picture frame intermediate piece and triangular bonnet mount frame.  Lots of alignment issues here but with patience it all fit together well

Bonnet being assembled for the final time.  It is not on saw horses this time, but lying on a table on top of about eight inches of foam pads.  Should be no dents this time!

Reassembled bonnet mounted back on the car.  It fit pretty well considering a complete disassembly and reassembly.  One shim had to be removed from the right hinge to improve the wing gap, otherwise it was just a question of careful setting of the latches.

The bonnet was reassembled for the final time and it went together well.  I learned my lesson about setting it upside-down on saw horses, so this time I prepared a flat table and laid about a foot thickness of foam pads on top to make a foam bed to set the bonnet on.  This worked well and I will continue to use this table whenever I have to work on the inside of the bonnet off the car. 

One bit of unfinished work on the bonnet involves the fasteners.  There are over 500 screws, washers, and nuts holding the bonnet parts together, and they are all supposed to be painted body color.  The only way to paint all the sheet-metal pieces is to have them all apart.  And I was afraid that if I painted all the fasteners separately the paint would be badly damaged when I assembled everything.  That probably was an unrealistic fear, but the damage is now done and the thing is assembled with zinc-plated fastener hardware.  I will try to go back and re-spray all the joined strips to paint the fasteners.  Some I may have to paint with a brush, both base and clear coats.  Any way I do it will be a lot of extra work and again, next time, I will paint the fasteners before assembling them!

With the bonnet refitted it was time to wet sand the entire upper part of the car in preparation for final paint.  This took me about 16 hours including once over with 400 grit paper then over it again with 600 grit. 

The primer had been sitting for over a month and it was hard to sand.  But that was good because it had shrunk down into the scratches beneath so when I sanded those scratches would be filled.  

The process is to spray the entire car with a light coat of black paint called a guide coat.  I use cheap, Walmart flat black paint for a guide coat because it is cheap and dries quickly.  There are a variety of more expensive guide-coat products available but I don’t think any work better than cheap flat black paint in a spray can.

The idea of the guide coat is that it fills all the “orange peel” roughness and any scratches in the primer with black color so when you sand you can see clearly when you have gotten through the irregularities.  The photo below shows pretty clearly what the scratches look like when you are sanding with a guide coat.  These scratches are the 150 grit scratches left in the body filler before I sprayed the final coat of primer.   When the black disappears the scratches are gone!

 

150 Grit Sanding Scratches showing up with black guide coat.

This final sanding also has to be done wet, with water, because the paper is so fine that if you tried to sand dry it would fill up with sanding dust immediately and become unusable.  Even with water the paper requires constant rinsing and cleaning. 

With the car sanded it was ready to be painted.  I wanted to paint the bonnet off the body so we could get all the edges and gaps painted nicely on both bonnet and body.  To do this I built a frame to hold the bonnet right-side up on a rolling cart that I have.  The frame was made from 4 x 4 lumber and can be seen in the next photo. By lifting the bonnet off the body and setting it on this frame we could roll it around and paint it separate from the body.  This worked out quite well as can be seen in the photos below.

Wood frame to hold the bonnet on a rolling cart for painting.

The three doors were also sanded with guide coat and 600 paper.  To paint the doors I arranged them on the two painting frames that I had used in my temporary booth.  In this way the doors could also be freely rolled around both in and out of the paint booth. 

Boot lid and side doors hung on painting frames ready to paint.

Now to get everything down to the BYU paint booth.  My friend, Clint Bybee, with the help of some students, had replaced all the booth filters and cleaned it up significantly and even repainted the walls white.  It was in better condition than it has been in for many years.  Clint even installed a new airline filter, and I bought a new clean air hose and gun filter to give us the best chances for a clean paint job.  I also did a deep clean on the spray gun as part of the preparation.

We moved the car down to BYU on our flat-bed trailer with the bonnet mounted on the body.  There is no other safe way to move the bonnet without building some kind of large crate.  It is too large to fit in any truck bed that we have so we attached it back onto the body for the move. 

Loading the car up ramps onto the flatbed trailer.  The front wheels of the cart are closer together than the rears so we had to use a sheet of plywood under the front wheels.  We also used a come-along to pull it up the ramps.  A stressful operation.

 It was quite a challenge to get it up the ramps onto the trailer but once it was strapped down it traveled OK.  School is about 6 miles away but I took a long way on back roads to avoid the main highways.  We got there without any incident and unloaded the car, rolled it into the booth, and removed the bonnet once again and set it on the cart built for the purpose.

This was all done on Thursday the 10^th of December, and we left everything at the booth until the next day when Josh would be free to do the painting.

Friday morning I went down to school and started masking.  Josh came soon after and we spent till about 3:00 pm just masking off the body and bonnet.  It was a cold day, snowing outside, but we kept the heater on in the booth while we did that large, time consuming job.

Friday evening about 4:00 pm. Finally masked and ready to paint.

Our plan was to spray 3 wet coats of green basecoat on the car followed by 3 wet coats of clearcoat.   This on body, bonnet, and doors.  Each coat took about 20 minutes to spray plus 15 minutes to dry a bit before the next coat.  We tried something interesting on the fuel-fill opening.  To get enough paint down inside the small opening we masked off all around the opening and sprayed down inside it first, thereby eliminating the possibility of too much paint and runs on the fender around the outside of the opening.  This worked well.  With the opening sprayed sufficiently we removed the masking paper and proceeded with painting the rest of the car.

Fuel fill opening masked for painting.

Body and bonnet with finished basecoat applied.  About 6:00 pm

 

Body in finished clearcoat still in booth about 9:00 pm

Bonnet in finished clearcoat about 9:00 pm

 

Josh cleaning the gun.  The job is completed.

 We left the finished car in the booth to sit and cure over the weekend.  The plan was to pick it up on Monday.  I went back on Saturday and removed the masking tape and paper and ran the heater for a while to help cure the paint.

I also decided late Friday night that I would not try to bring the car home on the flatbed trailer.  It was too risky.  I would empty out my enclosed trailer and use it to bring the car home.  It has a full-width beavertail ramp which makes it easy to load the car even with unequal width wheels.  Then I would leave the car in the enclosed trailer for several weeks to protect it while the paint cures.

 

Loading the finished car into the trailer.  I am smiling!

 

Again, the finished car going into the trailer for the trip home.  It will remain in this trailer till about January when it will move to the garage.

Josh and I are both very pleased with the results.  I don’t see how it could be any nicer.  When the paint has cured for six weeks or so I will cut and polish it to produce the glass-like finish fit for show.  At this point it seems a shame to polish it when the clearcoat looks so good, but the true luster of the paint is only accomplished by machine polishing.

The great challenge will be to assemble the car without scratching or damaging the paint in any way.  While the paint is curing in the trailer I will work on the engine and transmission.  I have already advised the machine shop that I am ready to build the engine and they promised to have the head done for me by Christmas.   I have a few other items to work on till then.

The next blog post will be next year.  I don’t know how much I will have done, so just stay tuned and wait to see.

Body work completed, painting started

 

In my last post, back in July, I finished by showing the bottom and inside of the car with one coat of Epoxy primer.  In this post I will show that the body work and priming is basically done for the entire car.  This is a long post but represents a lot of work that has been done during the last four months

A few posts back, when I was describing the cleaning and preparation of all the removable interior pieces that would receive upholstery, I regretted that I had no photo of the dashboard top.  Here is that missing photo showing the bead blasted, primed, and painted dashboard top with the defroster diffusers never removed.  I wish I could say that I had fitted the new vinyl cover to the top but that has not happened yet.  Should be in the next post along with the painted car.

Finished dashboard top, upside down, ready to fit new cover

With the car still on the rotisserie it was a good opportunity to turn the car upside down and spray a rock-chip resistant paint inside the rear wheel wells.  This paint is clear and goes on rather thick and never fully hardens so that it resists chipping by dirt and rocks being thrown up against it by the rear tires.  Some restorers spray a similar product over the entire bottom of the car to help prevent chipping paint, and that appears to be the way they came from the factory.  Mine was completely covered with a tar-like product over the entire bottom of the car and most of the bottom of the bonnet. 

It is possible that this coating was applied by the dealer who sold the car, in my case, in New York.  But whether original from the factory or not I consider the stuff so messy and difficult to work around that I am spraying only the inside of the rear wheel wells, and not with black tar goo but with tough, clear coating that can be painted over with body color.  Paint chips will just be a natural result of driving a real car on real roads.

Unfortunately I have no photos of the sprayed rear wheel wells.  Since the material is clear it doesn’t really show up visually, you have to feel it.  It might show up better when it is painted over with color.

At this point I decided to check the fit of the front marker lights and rear tail lights against the repaired body.   They fit fine, and while I was working with them I decided to clean them up and get them ready for final assembly.   They just needed some cleaning, the reflectors needed a little polishing, some small steel parts needed re-plating with Zinc, and one two-piece lense had come apart and needed re-gluing with anaerobic adhesive.   

The 12-volt lamps, after cleaning up, actually still lit, but I will get new ones to avoid early problems.  My real desire is to replace the lamps with LED lights, which are available but cost several hundred dollars per light, so I think I will wait on those.   I did install LED tail lights on my ’61 VW sedan and they are much more visible in those small-format rear lights than the old incandescents.  They are a significant safety factor on that car. 

 

The rear light housings before cleaning

The four lenses before cleaning

Left front turn signal light cleaned and fitted to the upside-down wing to check the fit.

Right tail light cleaned and fitted to the body to check the fit.

It’s hard to tell in the above photos but the lights fit fine and with their rubber seals will look as nice as new.  The LED versions will have to wait.

At the end of the previous post I showed the cart that I welded up.  It is a rolling cart to put the body on for upper body work and painting and later for final assembly.  With the body on the cart and the front rotisserie mount removed the firewall is accessible for assembly of the space frames and front mounts.  With these pieces in place the bonnet could be mounted on the car and aligned and made to fit correctly.  This fitting mostly involves getting the bonnet leveled front-to-back, centered on the car left- to-right, and making all the gaps uniform and smooth. 

 

Body with bonnet mounted on rolling cart.

When I first mounted the bonnet it fit terribly.  Additional mounting shims were required on both left and right sides (these I made from scrap aluminum) and the gaps were uneven and inconsistent.  The back edge of the right wing had to be extended an eighth of an inch by welding steel rods along the edge.  The curvatures of the body and bonnet then had to be matched using plastic body filler. 

Bonnet hinge with shims, as removed.  Additional shims had to be fabricated.

 

Bonnet-to-body gap is too wide.  Only possible repair was to weld metal onto back edge of wing.

 

Wire ready to weld to bonnet edge.

Back edge of bonnet with metal added.

The bottom edges of both wings had to be pulled in by elongating the holes in the bulkheads which hold the in-and-out position of the wings.  This wing alignment, together with the curve matching between the “Scuttle” and the back edge of the bonnet center section, took several weeks of work to get everything matched.

Body and bonnet ready for first full coat of Epoxy primer, the first of three primer coats.

After first primer coat, dents in the top of the bonnet became evident.

With the first full coat of primer dents in the flat upper surfaces of the bonnet became evident.  I realized that I created those dents by setting the bonnet upside-down on saw horses with the horses under the flat surfaces.  I will never do this again as the weight of the bonnet itself dented in the smooth, flat surfaces on both sides of the power dome just in front of the louvers.  This involved a lengthy and tedious repair with many applications of filler and primer to make these surfaces flat again. 

 

Block sanding right wing with 21-inch flat block

 

Block sanding the power dome with 21-inch block.  This block was used to renew surfaces all over the car.

After finally getting the bonnet straight, and spraying more primer, it became obvious that both rear fenders were not straight.   These were fixed with several more applications of body filler followed by block sanding.   They eventually came out nice.

 

Straightening the rear fenders.  Both needed the same treatment.  There had been no damage to the car in these areas so the trouble must have originated at the factory in Coventry.

Near the end of all this work I tried fitting the fuel-filler cover to the left rear fender.  It didn’t fit well at all; more trouble from the factory.  The angle of the upper edge of the cover did not match the angle of the opening.  To fix this I had to file the front edge of the cover and fill the upper edge of the opening with body filler to get the edges to match.  Glad I checked before painting everything.

 

Fixing the angle of the fuel-fill opening with plastic filler.

Another problem from the factory was the fit of the boot lid in its opening.  I had to temporarily assemble the boot-lid hinges and the latch mechanism and try to fit the lid.  But the edge of the lid along the hinge side was not straight and did not match the opening well.  To fix this I hammered and filed on the hemmed edge to try and get the correct profile for the opening.  This eventually came out pretty good, but when I sprayed more primer I discovered that I had filed though the hem creating an opening in the edge.  This probably should have been repaired by welding but I was afraid of warping the edge and making it even worse so I fixed it by pushing “JB Weld” epoxy filler into the crack.  This, I think, made an adequate repair that will never be seen.

 

Filed too far – JB Weld repair.

This was not the first body repair I had done with JB Weld.  This material has proven to be strong, sandable, durable, and paintable and allows clean repairs in difficult spots. 

Another interesting thing about the boot lid that I found is that someone at Coventry had scrawled the body number on the painted inside surface of the lid, designating it uniquely for this car as can be seen by the matching body number in the next photo.  The lids must have been selectively fit to the bodies, like pistons to cylinders, to minimize the amount of fitting required at each assembly before painting.

 

Body number 7476 hand written inside boot lid.

Body number tag riveted inside rear fender.

Another detail that my son, Josh, pointed out to me (he is good at pointing out details that I might overlook) was that the edges of some of the louvers in the bonnet were not straight.  I did the best I could to straighten these with a little bending and hammering.  They will be OK now.

 

Straightening the louver edges.

There were many other small repairs made all over the car, too numerous to mention, but these are examples of the kinds of repairs that have to be made to prepare a car for painting.   Eventually the entire car received a final coat of primer which will be left to cure for several weeks before sanding.  The purpose for the wait is to let the primer shrink before sanding, because if it shrinks after sanding the courser sanding scratches below the final coat show through the primer and even become visible in the paint.  The longer you can wait before final sanding of the primer, the better.

  

All the external parts in final prime.  They will be allowed to dry for a month or so while the inside of the bonnet and body are painted. 

There will be no problem waiting a month for the primer to cure as now the bonnet has to be completely disassembled and each piece primed and painted final green and then reassembled before painting the outside.  Also the firewall and entire inside of the car need sanding and painting.

 

Firewall in final primer, ready for sanding

Before all this can be done the body needs to be put back on the rotisserie so the bottom can be painted and the foot wells welded in.  All of this will take well into November.

At this point the bonnet was completely disassembled and each piece primed and sanded for painting.  The front space frames and forward frame parts were also sanded and painted.  Also a number of small parts, the door hinges, boot-lid hinges, heater vent doors, fuel cover and hinge, and a few other parts that needed to be green, were ready now to be painted. 

 All the fasteners removed from the forward frame assembly, sorted for easy return to their original positions.

It was a mile-stone day when I first mixed up some Opalescent Dark Green paint and sprayed these parts in final color, base coat and clear.  It will be a beautiful, dark metallic green that will certainly be an eye full when all assembled.  I can’t wait to see it!

 

 All bonnet pieces primed and ready for final sanding and green paint on their inside surfaces.  Also the doors and boot lid.

 

Front space frames, picture frame, and bonnet mount ready for green paint.  Never mind the fall leaves, they did not get on the paint!

Here are the front space frames painted final green

 

Small parts just painted green.  The photos don’t show it but they look great.

 

The first assembled green parts; left and right heater vent doors.

Besides being among the first parts painted green, the heater vent doors are the first green parts to be assembled to other parts.  The knobs have been attached to the doors!

I am posting this update in the middle of final sanding and painting.  The body work is basically done, except for some small repairs needed on the bottom and the foot wells still need to be welded in.  The final priming is done except for the footwells and those bottom repairs.  

Unfortunately the warm painting weather is gone so I am moving the painting into the garage with a portable booth set up with fans to control overspray and heat from my garage heater.  I will do all of the remaining painting in this booth except for the final body and bonnet, which will be done in the BYU paint booth in Provo, a professional automotive booth with fans, filters, and heaters.

 Finished bonnet parts in temporary paint booth, and fuel fill cover

The next post will feature the finish-painted body and all parts.  With the painting completed the winter will be spent in the heated garage putting the car together including the engine and transmission.  Each of these will probably receive a blog post all to itself.  I am still hoping to have the project done by April ‘21, making it an even three-year exercise.  Anybody want to do another?