First painting

I'm giggly. The first paint is on the car. I took the headlight bucket into Johnson's paint and matched up a metallic pretty close. I had the paint codes for the original blue. (PPG 14760 in case any one is interested). Of course, since I wanted a metallic blue, it didn't make a difference. You can't just add metal flake to a solid paint. The paint itself has to be translucent.

So I did the best I could with paintchips and the headlight bucket. It doesn't really matter since I'm painting the whole car...It could be pink if I was so inclined. But I wanted it to be representative of the original color.

Today I painted and it looks fantastic. There are a couple of spots here and there that will need to be fixed, but since this is my first shoot, I expected that, and bought extra paint. It is however VERY good. It could be left as is and 95% of people would never see the flaws.

It took three coats of blue to cover everything completely, and then two coats of clear to make it shine. I'll finish painting the rest of the car, and put it together. Then I'll probably scuff it all up again, add one last coat of blue and two more coats of clear, and it'll be perfect.

Pictures:

WET sanding this time

Last week, before I left, I hit the stripped and repaired body with an epoxy sealer, and then a filler surfacer primer. The filler/surfacer is a high build primer that helps fill in the low spots. It was very exciting to have the body all one color. It was an amazing feeling.

So this week, I started by putting a light guide coat of rattle can primer on the car. Not enough to have a color per say, just a light misting. Then...guess what? I sanded. This phase is called 'blocking' the car. I used 400 grit wet sand paper and sanded until my hands fell off, or until the guide coat was gone. Low spots show up when the guide coat doesn't sand away, while the surrounding area gets sanded down to fiberglass. High spots are the opposite. Thankfully, there were VERY few, VERY minor low and high spots. Saab does a really good job with fiberglass. The corvette guys in the class are very jealous.

After I was done, there were a few pinholes left over from the 30 year old filler on some of the edges, and a couple of minor low spots. I got that all finished before I left. Which means....next week...paint...eep!

I have to pick out the color...i think I'll go with the original blue, but with a little metallic added in. Unfortuneatly, you can't just go get the color code and say "add metallic". It won't work. You have to go get a paint that was fully designed with metallics. So I'll have to dig through the paint chips for all of the manufacturers and come up with something that's pretty close.