May 21, 2011

With the thoughts of the end of the world coming about (yeah right), I figured I'd go ahead and update the blog once again. Over the past few days I have been spending time on the bodywork. The fenders and the hood I recently got all had small dents and scratches, so I went ahead and started with some Bondo. A friend of mine helped out with the sanding of the hood since he had access to a electric sander (highly useful by the way). With the sanding, Bondo and primer applied to the top side of the hood, that job only took about 2 hours, whereas sanding by hand has been taking forever. As suggested by my brother I started to fill the lines of the doors and fenders with Bondo too to create a more seamless appearance and I must admit, I like the appearance of the top line so far since I have nearly completed the entire driver side. However, the wide gap line at the bottom portion that wraps the entire car may not turn out as good as I would like, but I'll see when I get there.

I have also been tossing around the idea of painting the car myself. I ended up going to Harbor Freight to price some guns and what not and came across some useful tools for the current work I'm doing. I ended up getting a metal mixer plate for the Bondo, some metal spreader blades (because the plastic ones take too friggin long to clean), a respirator mask for the painting and a can of paint that I have been very curious about. The paint is part of Dupli-Color's Paint Shop Finish line. This product has been reviewed on many automotive TV shows and has been spoken of highly. It is a lacquer based paint that comes pre-mixed, and is shown as a painting "step" type procedure. The can of primer is marked as step 1, the can of paint color step 2, the can of clear is step 3 or 4 depending on if you use the "metallic" clear first. With all the videos that I have seen and the thought of being a newbie wanting to try my hand at something new, I thought why not.



I went ahead and took the passenger side fender over to a friends house because he's got a massive air compressor and I haven't picked one up yet. I had nothing more to this fender than just sand it down and prime it for the test run. Slapping the first base coat down was pretty slow since I needed to tweak the gun settings the whole time to get the spray width and speed just right, but the other two coats went quick after that. I used just shy of a third of the can (which is only a 1 quart can I believe) and it came out great. I didn't use any clear since I just wanted an idea of what the paint would look like and how well I did with my first attempt at painting. Now I am sure this is the paint I will use. I don't have many pictures this time, but I've got a great view of the fender after paint. More to follow next week.