Finally, there’s one phenomenon about buying hobby cars—or any cars—that I’ve never been able to understand, but it really is central to this book. Why buy a paint job you don’t want or aren’t going to keep? Especially in the rod and custom field, I see people pay the big bucks for a nice, finished car and then, a year or so later, decide they’d rather change the color, and the upholstery, and maybe the wheels and tires, to make it more “their car.” Well, they’re paying twice for all that stuff that was fine to begin with.
The point of this is to find a sound well-priced car with good potential that needs a paint job. You add your own paint and finish the car however you like it. That way you can pay about half instead of double, have the car look the way you really want, and have the satisfaction of doing it yourself. Somehow that sounds more sensible to me.
Further, the first thing that you should be suspicious about on any car you’re looking to buy is a fresh paint job. You’ve heard of “resale red,” and with any experience you can spot quickie cover-up paint that very likely hides a multitude of sins. But I’ve seen far too many high-dollar cars, of all types, with beautiful-looking—even show-winning—paint jobs that turn out to have a ton of filler under that shiny, smooth surface. They’re not all that way, of course. But production body shops, and even busy custom shops, know they have to get cars in and out quickly, and sanding filler smooth is a lot easier and faster than properly straightening, forming, or replacing sheetmetal. If you buy something with new paint (even a full, fresh coat of primer), you really don’t know what’s under it. If you buy something that needs paint, or still has all its factory finish on it, you have a much better idea what you’re getting.
Save an Old Paint Job
You’d be surprised how dead a paint job you can bring back to life. I’m not talking about making the car show-winning perfect. I’m talking about a car that someone has let go—left out to fade and oxidize—and all you want to do is make it shiny and nice once again. On the other hand, at concours shows you see old, original classics that have been meticulously taken apart, cleaned, and polished—both old painted and bare-metal parts—until they look just like new. You can do much the same thing to any old car, for nearly no investment other than time and elbow grease.
In the old days I heard of people oiling or waxing primer to make it shiny. If you ever intend to paint over it, don’t do that. Also, I’d see guys (especially lowriders) wax whatever paint was on the car, repeatedly, until it got real shiny. If they went through the paint down to the factory primer, that was okay. It’d be shiny, too. With the abrasive paste waxes of the day, you could shine up most any old paint job pretty quickly; the more you waxed, the shinier the car got. Here, we’ll do something similar, with more modern polishing products, and hope we don’t hit primer.
Another option, with the variety of catalyzed clears available today, is to scuff down and clear coat whatever you’ve got. That’s a possibility (even over primer), but we won’t delve into it here because it isn’t common; any scratches, blotches, or other irregularities in the underlying paint (including sanding scratches) not only show but are usually magnified. On the other hand, the big craze among the rod and custom crowd now is “patina.” Not only are worn, faded and flaking paint jobs prized (partly to prove that the car has old, original sheetmetal), but some people are actually “weatherizng” paint jobs to create fake (or “faux”) patina. Whatever. You’ll have to find some other book or magazine to teach you that.
We show more on spotting-in paint in following chapters, but let’s consider a vehicle that looks like it needs a new paint job, but might not. The car in question is a ’93 Honda Accord wagon that my wife bought, new. She took very good care of it for 200,000+ miles, including several cross-country trips (seen here somewhere east or west of Laramie), but it never once spent a night or day under cover—nor got waxed. The clear coat was getting chalky in places, but the metallic red hadn’t visibly faded—a testament to today’s factory paint jobs. When Anna got a low-mileage white Camry (which you see in Chapter 8), she willed this one to me, and I decided to see what I could do to fix it up without a full new paint job.
Oftentimes, new cars get damaged in shipment and repaired at the dealer before they’re sold. Apparently that happened with the front bumper. We crunched the rear gate and had to have it repaired and repainted. These were the only two places the clear coat had actually peeled off. In such cases neither buffing nor recoating with clear works; you have to sand it down, repaint the base coat, and reclear it.
Try to sand off as much of the peeling clear coat as possible, but also try not to sand through the factory primer coats. Also note the peeling black-rubber roof strips had stainless steel underneath. I removed the remaining rubber with a razor blade and buffed the stainless.
Being the rodder I am, my first job was to peel off what trim I could, remove the washer and wiper, and weld up holes where the emblem and washer had been.
Next I wet-sanded the areas to be repainted with 360-grit, taping off other areas to protect them.
Before spot-painting the bumpers and tailgate, I tried buffing a portion of the weathered paint to make sure it would “come up,” which it did nicely.
If you can repaint full body panels separated by seams, it’s not the same as “spotting in” and matching the color exactly isn’t nearly as important. Here I have masked off the entire sanded tailgate, plus the rear bumper, which got some dings and scratches erased with high-fill primer.
What we show here, instead, is how to buff and polish a tired old paint job until it looks, maybe not as good as new, but a heck of a lot better than it did. It still takes some effort, but we can make the vehicle look presentable without all the preparation, labor, materials, equipment, and expense of a full-on paint job. We rely primarily on wax and polishing compounds, with some minor spot painting, if necessary.
First off—this needs to be discussed somewhere in this book, and this is as good a place as any—automotive wax products are mostly snake oil, in my opinion. Somebody comes up with a new “Wonder Wax” that does everything short of curing cancer and pimples seemingly every month, and advertises it aggressively until a new one takes its place. Car magazines are full of ads for them. Barkers at car shows