I learned about welding, grinding, and metal fabrication as a young teen in metal shop classes in school, and got further experience when my father bought an acetylene welding outfit for use on the family ranch, and made me the primary welder. Again, you learn by doing—burning and cutting your fingers as well as burning holes in metal.
However—and this is a theme repeated throughout this book—I was learning these things at a point of major transition in the entire bodywork/welding/painting industry. For generations, bodywork was done with hammers and dollies, welding was done with torches, filling was done with lead, and painting was done with lacquer. That’s the way it was done from the 1920s through the early 1960s. Those are the methods Barris showed readers in his how-to articles.
But paddling lead was way beyond me (and most) young beginners. On the other hand, resin-based “plastic” fillers, which were just coming on the market at that time, afforded an alternative. Unfortunately, typical of pioneering products, many weren’t quite perfected, nor were their methods of application. This gave plastic fillers a bad name they definitely no longer deserve, but still find hard to shake. The real problem with plastic fillers is the same today as it was then—and it’s a fault in technique, not the product. Filler is very easy to apply, with no special tools or talents, and was and is therefore often spread too thickly over poorly prepared surfaces. The latter was also true of lead; it just took a bit more training and equipment to do it.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but let me give you one example from my early experience that gives a hint of dealing with changing technology. Brazing is simpler, faster, and causes less warpage than gas welding sheetmetal. It’s not as strong or permanent as welding for joining pieces of metal, but it’s great for things like filling holes. It’s also perfectly compatible with lead. Most of those early articles showing Barris, Starbird, and others doing custom bodywork showed them brazing on sheetmetal, and then covering it with lead. It’s what Barris said to do. So that’s what I did in several cases, but then I covered it with filler instead of lead. But filler, no matter how good, is not compatible with brazing. I don’t know the chemical specifics, but they just won’t stick to each other. I learned this the hard way, after my carefully sanded, primed, and painted bodywork produced bulges or bubbles wherever I had brazed the surface and filled over it. The only way to fix it was to cut out the brazed area, weld in sheetmetal patches, and start over. Today, as I am finding lots of small brazed areas from long-ago bodymen as I prepare my original ’32 Ford body for paint, I am glad to learn that certain high-adhesion sealers (such as PPG DP40, or similar) can be applied over brazing and then coated with sanding primers or even plastic fillers.
Continuing the theme of early experience and changing technology, spray paint cans didn’t become prevalent until the early ’60s. So when I wanted to customize my first bicycle (riser handlebars, bobbed rear fender, and so on), I took it all apart, carefully hand-sanded the frame and other parts, then brush-painted them with some sort of gloss enamel—purple, I believe. About the same time (the late ’50s), my friends and I switched from model airplanes to model cars, which we also customized (this soon became a national fad). These we also brush painted, painstakingly, to get them as smooth and glossy as possible. But we also spent considerable time prepping the plastic bodies: sanding down mold lines, filling depressions (or customizing the body) with putties, priming, and then doing lots more sanding with increasingly fine grits of paper, before we thinned down the “enamel for plastics” paint and flowed it on with carefully chosen brushes. Then, especially as the kits became more complete, we learned to use different and realistic colors to hand-paint engines, chassis parts, chrome trim, and so on. What this early model building taught us was careful and thorough preparation, color selection, detailing, and patience. These are all requisites of a good paint job on a real car.
Then came spray paint. This wasn’t an entirely new learning curve, because the prep, patience, detailing, and so on didn’t change. But we had to learn a new technique that wasn’t easy, at first, to master. It took a lot of practice and experimentation: making jigs or props to hold the various parts, getting all the dust off, spraying tack coats, warming the paint under hot water in the sink, then trying to keep all dust, dirt, or bugs off until it dried. But the real talent was learning how to wield that spray can so you could get an even—and the glossiest possible—coat in that seemingly very narrow window between orange peel and runs. We also learned that switching from one type of paint to another (enamel to lacquer, for instance), or even changing brands, usually required some testing and adjustment. Moving from spray cans to spray guns was a bigger step, but it still takes the same talent and the same feel. The best way—the only way, really—to learn how to paint with a spray gun is to do it. Spray cans are an excellent (and cheap) place to start. But whether you are painting model cars, the kids’ bikes, or the back porch furniture, go out and paint stuff. Start practicing. Right now.
Most of my friends were older and got cars before I did. They were also smarter, and got cars that didn’t need any real bodywork, just new, better, sharper or cooler paints jobs. In our small town, there were only a couple of “paint shops.” One guy built a cinder-block spray booth in his backyard and the other had an old building downtown that I’m not sure even had a booth. But both were glad to spray cars for a minimal fee if we did all the prep and bought the materials. See, if you know how to spray paint—and if you do it regularly—that’s the easiest part of the job, by far. And we were young and eager (especially me), so doing the grunt work not only saved money, it was even fun. The only cost was several sheets of wet-or-dry sandpaper and rolls of masking tape. Disassembling the cars (removing bumpers, lights, emblems, and so on) was intuitive. Removing things like doors handles and certain chrome trim was more mysterious. We either figured it out, or left them on and masked them. Sometimes getting them back on was more difficult.
Again, I don’t know how we learned to start wet-sanding with 220 paper, how to fold it, how to featheredge chips, how not to use our fingertips, and how to finish with 360 or 400 grit—probably from the magazines. But there was also some sort of common knowledge among us teens who worked on our cars, which we all shared. In fact, I remember a few “paint parties,” wherein the car owner would buy the beer and invite everybody over to sand the car in an afternoon. You wouldn’t always get the best quality, but you’d get the grunt work done, and you could touch up the rough spots later. I also remember some bloody fingers.
For my own first car I wasn’t nearly so smart. I inherited a sound, but exceedingly beat-up old Chevy sedan. It needed a whole lot of bodywork, and about all I knew was beating out big dents with a heavy rubber mallet that my dad used for similar purposes. Using blocks of wood as dollies, I tried doing what it showed in the magazines, but of course it wasn’t nearly was as easy as it looked (and I didn’t have the proper equipment). Finally I figured out I could remove the fenders, lay them on the driveway, and beat them flat against the pavement. I don’t recommend this today, but “whatever works” is still a rule of bodywork in my garage. Fortunately, by pure luck, I happened across a $10 dead identical parts car that had excellent sheetmetal that I could simply swap for my bent and broken parts. Thus I learned a new lesson in bodywork: It’s often much easier and ultimately cheaper to bolt on a new, decent fender (or other body part) than it is to try to straighten out a mashed one.
When it came to body and paint, my first car gave me plenty to learn. But I couldn’t hurt it. The good part was that it didn’t have any rust. But it was really beat up and abandoned in a field when I got it. In this photo, I’d already been working on it six months, including taking the fenders off and pounding them flat against the ground. Of course I got the car for free.
I found a parts car for $10 with good sheetmetal and swapped the fenders, trunk, and other parts. I sanded the car down and removed most trim in preparation for paint, but that’s as far as I got, so I drove