Paint Prep

A friend is going to paint the car for me, but I’m doing as much of the prep work as I can.  That way he can just “spray&go”.

But, before I got to sanding and such, I needed to reinforce the new mounting location of the driver’s rear view mirror.  I moved it to the A-pillar, but now it “flops around” while driving.   So, I took some 3/16″ steel plate (probably overkill), cut it to shape and hammered it until it fit the inside contour of the door skin.  Then I buttered the front side with bondo, and slid it into place.

 

Next, a little more bondo over the old holes, and some sanding to blend it in.

The main task of the weekend, however, was to sand the body in preparation for painting.

Removed the doors, taped the door handles, masked off the interior to prevent dust from getting in.  The basic plan?  Use my random orbit sander with 60gr, 120gr, 220gr.  Then hand sand at 220 with a contour sander, and wetsand with 320.  Some say wetsand 320 is overkill for a racecar, but honestly the wetsand took about two hours after an entire weekend of sanding.

The area below the dividing line is coated with this bumpy crud…its like really heavy orange peal.  I used the 60gr heavily in this area to get the peaks down, and smooth the whole thing out.

I dropped the rear bumper cover in order to get to the crevice between it and the fender.  There were cracking layers of paint in the crevice.

Yep, inside the gas cap area, too.

All the old primer has been sanded off

Finally, I sanded the inside of the hard-top, and painted it with the same color as the rest of the interior.