Day 162

Another productive day!

I finished all my black items which was the bumper supports and brackets.  I also had to touch up an under seat spring.  They turned out nice.

And then I went about getting the rest of the body parts in primer.  I was just going to do the doors and underside of the hood but remembered I still had some small parts to do too!

I did get my doors mounted on one of the fender poles.  A little bit of a challenge getting the first screw started while holding the doors by myself but they went up and it worked!

Everything turned out ok, I think I am going to have quite a bit more smoothing work on the doors to do.  I did my best to get them flat before primer but it isn't as good as I'd like.  Will see what happens when I block sand but will probably end up doing more filler work and priming again.  We'll see.

Day 161

Well, as expected I have and will continue to be very busy with work and some fun things too!

I was able to re-adjust my fender stands so that each fender was on a separate stand.  Made for easier painting, less overspray and overall better experience.  I will adjust two of them as the fender was a bit high on each pole.  No big deal though.

I got the fenders, decklid, and half the hood painted today.  I will finish up tomorrow with the other side of the hood and the doors.  This layer of paint builds up enough coverage so that I can sand it flat before final color application.  I was happy overall with the results.  A couple runs which I can be better about.  I also found some areas where my body work beneath the newly sprayed paint revealed I could have done a better job.  Missed a couple dings and dents, some filler here and there.  But all of that can be fixed in due time.

I'm also going to try and paint the remaining black items tomorrow.  But pretty good day!

Day 160

Work is going to really start picking up these next few weeks and I'll have little time to work on the car.  BUT, in between work and rest I will be able to get some small projects done.

Today I did some media blasting to get the bumper spacers and new bumper support tubes I bought all clean.  They need to be epoxy primed and then painted black.  I have a couple other items that need to be painted black as well.

The big project today was designing and building a fender support system.  One of the issues I had with painting the small parts is either overspray on a 2nd coat on the backside of a part or it was sticking to the paper if I tried to do both sides.  It was kind of messy when I did primer and better with the small parts.  But for the stuff people are going to actually look at I need to make sure my system works.

This is for the rears and each fender will be on opposite sides of the vertical board. above and below each other.

The fenders are also very awkward and I needed a solid support so that they didn't sway with the air pressure of my paint gun.

So, I came up with a system that takes a 2x4 and runs down from an overhead piece of wood that is part of my paint booth.  I re-used some old parts of my dolly when I cut it down a bit as feet and got it all put together.  I then supported the fenders with one through bolt and a horizontal arm with two more support bolts.

This setup should allow me to spray paint on both sides at once.  I'm going to try it with the primer filler and see how well it works.  If it's difficult to get to all the nooks and crannies I can still mask off areas I don't want painted and do each side one at a time.

Another positive is that because I will be spraying a metallic paint the parts need to be sprayed in the orientation that they will be on the car.  That is because the tiny metal flakes in the paint will flow with gravity and if not painted the way it would be on the car (like the rest of the car is painted) it will be noticeable.

We'll see how it works!