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.