Incidentally, you may not realize it, but many brand new cars (more so in the past; they try to protect them better these days) get damaged in shipping, or even on the lot, and get spot-repainted at the dealer’s before they are sold new. I don’t know exactly how the factory cures its paint jobs, but factory paint is invariably more durable than any kind of repaint. That was the case with our sample car. The front bumper was apparently repainted by the dealer and the tailgate was repaired and repainted by a bodyshop. These were the first areas to peel. The rest of the factory finish, even after 12-plus years outside, took plenty of rubbing and polished up nicely.
When you’re spotting-in a paint job with a clear coat, it is relatively easy. If most of the clear coat is lifting, sand it all down, repaint the entire panel for full and even coverage with new base coat, and then clear coat the entire panel. If only a small portion of the clear coat is bad, or if the area has scrapes or other small damage, you can sand down the affected area (into the good clear coat), spot-in new base coat to cover the damage (again, spraying over at least a small portion of the good clear coat), then clear coat the entire panel. This works fine even if you have to do a little bodywork and priming in the damaged area to start—as long as you fully cover all primer, and any of its overspray, with base coat. You can even try spotting-in the clear coat—again, spraying beyond the base-coated area and any of its overspray—and rubbing out the junction of the old and new clear coats. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. But, hey, if it doesn’t (if you can see a line or edge between the new and old clear coats once it’s buffed out), simply scuff down and reshoot the whole panel with a full clear coat. Depending on the type of car you’re restoring, your proclivities, and how well you can get the clear coat to lay down and gloss out, you can either leave it as-sprayed and start waxing it regularly along with the rest of the car, or you can color-sand and rub it out.
You also might be surprised how many scrapes and abrasions on your car are less than skin deep, and can be removed or significantly repaired by some rubbing with compound.
On this car I decided to try 3M Super Duty compound to start, which is about as coarse as you’d want to use on anything. Since it comes in a jug, it helps to put some in a squirt bottle for ease of application. Then I used a cutting pad on my power buffer to do the whole car. This is extreme; you might want to start with something less abrasive. See Chapter 11 for more details on rubbing out paint, old or new.
If your car doesn’t have a clear coat, spotting-in is more difficult. With metallics or modern paints with pearl added, it is nearly impossible to spot-in a portion of a body panel, rub it out, and have it blend in with the former finish so you can’t tell. About the only recourse here is to repaint a full panel separated from the rest of the body by seams or trim. Another possibility here is to spot-in areas that need it, and then clear coat the whole car. This is unusual, but certainly possible.
If your vehicle is painted in a one-step, non-metallic color such as red, yellow, or black, spotting it in and rubbing out the area is usually easy, particularly if the paint is fresh (i.e., you got a run while you were doing the paint job, a bug landed in it, some paint pulled off with the tape, whatever). Just sand the area with 360-grit until the dirt, bug, or rough edge is gone, repaint the area, and rub it out. If you saved some of the original paint, this also works on an older paint job if you’ve kept it in good shape. Of course I’m talking about some sort of catalyzed, hardened paint (both the original and the spot paint), or lacquer.
Now, if you’re dealing with older paint that’s spent any time in the sun, it’s going to be faded to some extent. Reds and lighter colors are especially susceptible. So even if you carefully saved some of the original paint, it’s probably not going to match anymore. On the other hand, if the paint is new, but you didn’t paint it, and you don’t have any of the exact same paint that was used, don’t expect new paint to match just because you ordered the same color code that’s on the car. Nearly all automotive paint is mixed by the can, as it is ordered. Some minor differences usually show in the shade of the color, the cast of the metallic, or the intensity of the pearl, from one new can of paint to another. This doesn’t matter if you’re painting a whole car, and it usually doesn’t matter if you’re painting a whole panel—the colors are close enough that you can’t tell.
As I say in the text, the best thing about trying to restore old paint (factory or otherwise) is that, if you rub through it, you can then repaint it. We show how elsewhere in this book. But for 12-year-old paint that had never been waxed or spent a night in a garage, this one really came back to life with a little rubbing and waxing. No new paint job needed here.
If the old paint is perceptibly faded, or you’re trying to blend spot paint in the middle of a panel, you need the paint “color-matched.” Experts—and these are few—can do it by eye. Many shops these days have electronic equipment (spectrometers or spectrographs) to do it. Neither method is perfect.
Ultimately, it depends on how picky—and perceptive—you are. I notice mis-matched paint jobs all the time, usually on cars with metallic or pearl paints repaired at collision shops. The owners apparently don’t notice or don’t care. Probably both.
Then there are the super-picky. A friend won’t finish his beautiful silver metallic ’54 Chevy because the paint shop messed something up and had to repaint the front fenders. They’ve redone them three times now, and he still sees a slight difference in the hue. Silver is about the hardest color to match, and this one has pearl in it, which is worse. Just adding a second or third coat, especially of a light color, changes its shade slightly. So will painting it over different colors of primer. Spot painting, or partial repainting—even with the same paint you started with—is hardly ever going to be perfect or seamless, especially to a very picky eye. If you’re that type of person, I’d suggest you sand down the whole car, coat it evenly with an opaque sealer close in shade to the final color, then respray the entire car, preferably all at the same time, and definitely with the same number of coats on each part. Remember, it’s your car, you’re the only one you really have to please, and you’re doing all the work yourself. How perfect do you want it?
Once you have touch-up paint for the car, use it straight from the can (unthinned), with a small brush, to fill-in any small chips, scratches, or nicks that don’t require spraying. For any car you paint, save a little extra for this sort of touch-up.
The Stages of Paint
We keep talking about different processes that apply to different “stages” or levels of paint jobs, so we should run down a quick list of them here. Automotive paint jobs vary vastly from whatever a one-day “in-and-out” special costs these days, to a 5-figure (at least) professional