During my first summer home from college I rented a small sprayer and primed, re-sanded, and masked the car. Then I bought three quarts of enamel (’62 Corvette Fawn Beige and Cordovan Brown), one of sealer, and got a local painter to spray it in his backyard booth for $25. This was the next day, mostly reassembled (the front bumper was at the chrome shop).
After several years of daily driving with this first enamel paint, the car had some dings and dents. I fixed those and started refurbishing it in preparation for a better lacquer paint job.
However, my old bomb was 2-tone to start, and the replacement fenders and trunk were a third color, all of which I eagerly sanded down. But I had no painting equipment (nor money to pay someone else to paint it), so I touched up a few bare spots with spray-can primer and drove this laughable coat-of-many-colors all through high school. It wasn’t until about a year later that I rented a cheap little compressor and gun, primed the car in my dad’s garage (got in trouble for that), bought two shades of metallic enamel (and a quart of “aircraft sealer” that the painter wisely recommended), and got one of the local guys to spray it in his backyard booth for $25. Wow, what a difference! I waxed it about once a week through college to keep it that way (dorms didn’t have garages and car covers were unheard of). But I finally started wearing through the enamel, and tiring of people asking me “Did you paint that yourself?” and having to reply, “No.” What I really wanted was a “custom” lacquer finish, anyway.
I should admit right now that I obviously have a hot rod/custom car bent that derives partly from my generation, but probably more so from a personal and financial do-it-yourself mentality. For me, hot rodding is 70% about fixing up old cars—taking something cheap that no one else wants and making it look good, then using some traditional tricks and my own ingenuity or creativity to make it look better than good (that’s the other 30% of rodding and customizing). But this book is not about “custom painting.” Plenty of books talk about that already. We won’t even talk much about custom paints or products, because they are changing constantly. We talk about the basics of stripping down, straightening out, fixing up, prepping, and repainting any vehicle that you think (1) needs it, or (2) will look better in a different color. We also proceed on the premise that you want to do this because (a) you don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for someone else to do it, or (b) you think you can do the job better yourself, without paying someone else thousands of dollars to do it less well. Just being of that mind makes you something of a hot rodder in my book (and a bit of a rebel, at that). But no matter. This book is for anyone who wants to repaint a car at home, for whatever reason. An added bonus is that once you have the equipment and know how to use it, you can paint all sorts of things.
That paint job didn’t happen, as other projects took precedence (family, job, pickup, etc.). But by then I had a garage to paint in, my own compressor, and so on. Since it basically only had one paint job over factory paint, I never stripped any of it. Nor did I fully disassemble it. I just sanded it thoroughly, sprayed it with lacquer primer, sanded some more, then sprayed it in the same colors in lacquer (no clear), and hand-rubbed it out, as seen here in 1981.
Since this car had finally been promoted from daily driver to fun car (not show car), I decided it was time to detail the underside, as well. Other than the gas tank, which was painted with leftover lacquer from the body, the rest of this was done with spray cans (and one piece of chrome). This cost virtually nothing other than cleaning and sanding time, and was surprisingly easy to maintain.
Here’s the same car, same paint, in 2005. People say straight lacquer won’t last that long, but it will if you take care of it. A garage, a car cover, and plenty of careful wax jobs help.
Since I’m talking about my own experience and self-teaching here, before we get to yours, let me give you a couple more instructive examples.
Somehow I acquired a ’49 Chevy pickup, late on a dark night, for free. I wanted it because it had the five-window cab. When I saw it the next morning in daylight, I knew I was nuts. But I kept it and started fixing it up. First I transplanted everything possible (from driveline to gauges, radio, wiring, radiator, etc.) from a beat-up but good-running ’62 Chevy 4-door I had. I found a new bed, rear fenders, and running boards. Somebody gave me some seats. It took a couple years before it was ready for paint. The single-car garage at the triplex we were living in then wasn’t big enough to paint a car in (besides, my first Chevy was stored in it), so I did it in the open driveway. I decided to paint it black lacquer, and got the proper materials from a nearby auto paint store. A friend loaned me a good spray gun, and I rented a decent-size 110-volt compressor that kept blowing the circuit breaker during the job. But it didn’t matter because straight-color (non-metallic) lacquer is really easy to spray. You can start and stop. If something screws up or a bug lands in it, wait 15 minutes, scuff it down, and spray that part again. I never stripped this truck to bare metal, and I can’t remember if I ever primed the whole thing, but whatever (little) paint was still on it was old enough that nothing lifted or wrinkled. I was lucky.
While a starving student (with no garage to work in), I came across this ’47 Chevy pickup abandoned in a very dark canyon one night. I’d always wanted a “fat cab” Chevy, especially the “5-window” version. The property owner said I could have it if I hauled it out right then. When I saw it in bright light the next morning, I realized how foolish I was. Free is free, but find something better than this to start with. It obviously had no driveline, but I had a running 6-cylinder, 3-speed ’62 sedan that donated engine, transmission, wiring/electricals/radiator, and so on.
Since these old Chevy pickups are (still) quite plentiful, I swapped much of the sheetmetal, including the entire bed, but still did a lot of hammer/dolly/filler bodywork, before spraying (with rented/borrowed equipment, in my driveway) my first full paint job, in black lacquer. It’s truly easy to paint and maintain. Got some chips? Spot it in and rub some more. A daily driver, it had made several cross-country trips when these photos were taken. The camper was metallic silver catalyzed enamel, color sanded and buffed out (my first try at that). Ed “Big Daddy” Roth added the pinstriping (red on the camper, blue on the body).
But here’s the funny part—nobody told me anything about color sanding. And I didn’t have any kind of buffer. Besides, I’d always heard that “hand-rubbed” lacquer was best. So I rubbed out that whole paint job, with paste compound and rags, by hand, until it had that deep gloss that only black lacquer can have. It took a couple of days. My hands were blistered. But it was beautiful! What did I know? With a little camper on the back, my wife and I drove that truck all over the country, several times. When the paint got chipped or dinged I just spotted it in and rubbed it out some more. Black lacquer is probably the easiest-to-maintain paint there is (or was; I can’t