This past winter I painted my 1970 vette in my garage. Im not sure if this is the place for a post like this, but hopefully someone will find it helpful or inspirational.
In January, the chipping pink paint finally got the best of me and one afternoon I was bored out at my parents house (famous last words) and started pealing paint off the front bumper. Here is the story of the next 6 months. I have tried to cover all processes and prices as best as possible. Hopefully this will help convince someone else to take the plunge and start their own paint project. There is no right way to paint a car, just lots of wrong ways.
Before you get started do some reading. I purchased the following books from Amazon. They mostly cover the same information, but its good to get different perspectives and each lent their own unique tips and tricks.
How to Paint Your Car
Pro/Paint & Body
How To Paint Your Car On A Budget
Now that you have some idea of what is in store for you, its time to start taking off the paint. My car was in bad shape. Someone had done a crappy pink paint job over a crappy red paintjob (actually 3-4 crappy red paint jobs). The paint was bubbling and chipping all over the place and it had been badly keyed on all the fenders, across the rear, and even one T-top! Here it is last summer after I got it running nicely.
I didnāt want to use a chemical stripper because I had heard some bad horror stories. I figured the x-acto blade method would work the best in my situation because I was just trying to take off as much paint as possible, but didnāt necessarily need to go down to the glass.
I had a lot of paint on the car. As a result, it was coming off in large chunks. This posed a problem because after getting the razor blade more than Ā½ā under the paint it would jam into the blade handle and force me to rotate and break the paint chip. This got to be a very slow and tedious process after a while. After a cold one and some brain storming, I grabbed a 2ā metal painterās trawl and sharpened it on a bench grinder making sure the tip was smooth and straight across. The process really picked up now and I was pulling off even bigger chunks (the biggest was about 4āx6ā off the rear deck).
I was able to get most of the pink paint off easily. A few areas had some body filler under it making the removal process very difficult. This paint job is only going to be a temporary fix until I do a frame off in a few years. Therefore, I didnāt mind just sanding these areas and using some body filler to even things out.
Here it is when I was done taking paint off with the trawl.
In January, the chipping pink paint finally got the best of me and one afternoon I was bored out at my parents house (famous last words) and started pealing paint off the front bumper. Here is the story of the next 6 months. I have tried to cover all processes and prices as best as possible. Hopefully this will help convince someone else to take the plunge and start their own paint project. There is no right way to paint a car, just lots of wrong ways.
Before you get started do some reading. I purchased the following books from Amazon. They mostly cover the same information, but its good to get different perspectives and each lent their own unique tips and tricks.
How to Paint Your Car
Pro/Paint & Body
How To Paint Your Car On A Budget
Now that you have some idea of what is in store for you, its time to start taking off the paint. My car was in bad shape. Someone had done a crappy pink paint job over a crappy red paintjob (actually 3-4 crappy red paint jobs). The paint was bubbling and chipping all over the place and it had been badly keyed on all the fenders, across the rear, and even one T-top! Here it is last summer after I got it running nicely.
I didnāt want to use a chemical stripper because I had heard some bad horror stories. I figured the x-acto blade method would work the best in my situation because I was just trying to take off as much paint as possible, but didnāt necessarily need to go down to the glass.
I had a lot of paint on the car. As a result, it was coming off in large chunks. This posed a problem because after getting the razor blade more than Ā½ā under the paint it would jam into the blade handle and force me to rotate and break the paint chip. This got to be a very slow and tedious process after a while. After a cold one and some brain storming, I grabbed a 2ā metal painterās trawl and sharpened it on a bench grinder making sure the tip was smooth and straight across. The process really picked up now and I was pulling off even bigger chunks (the biggest was about 4āx6ā off the rear deck).
I was able to get most of the pink paint off easily. A few areas had some body filler under it making the removal process very difficult. This paint job is only going to be a temporary fix until I do a frame off in a few years. Therefore, I didnāt mind just sanding these areas and using some body filler to even things out.
Here it is when I was done taking paint off with the trawl.