Body & Paint Prep

Body & Paint Prep

I thought I'd write another article on body prep & paint work, since prep is in my opinion one of the most important steps in the process of creating the perfect paint work on your classic car, or muscle car, I know I have done an article on this before, but I can't stress enough how important it is.

After that body of the car has been stripped of all paint, and previous body work, and you have redone the body work that needs to be done, the prep stage of the body work will begin, and different people define this in different ways.

You should begin this stage of work by shooting primer to the car, I usually recommend three coats of high build urethane, or epoxy primer for this step, and in every case I recommend twenty four hours of dry time before you begin to sand the car.

After you have let the car dry for twenty four hours, sand the car and then seal all of the seams, let me remind you that this won't be the final prime on the car, you'll need to prime it one more time after you seal all of the seams on the car.

Seam sealing is an absolute must when you do a complete paint job on your car, seam sealing will stop water, and other contaminants for getting between the welded areas of the metal and causing it to rust, there are a lot of choices of seam sealer, but I use 3M fast and firm sealer when I do it.

This is a critical part of the prep process on your car, and it has to be don the right way to work right, I usually run a strip of masking tape down each side of the seam, leaving about 1/8 of an inch for the seam sealer to sit in, and this seems to work great for me, you can do it as yo like.

Give the seam sealer about two hours to dry, and then you can sand the car by hand with 220 grit paper on a long sanding block, once you have sanded the entire car with the 220 grit paper you can re-prime again, and you should be ready to wet sand the entire car first with 400 grit paper, and then if you want to 600 grit wet paper for the best results.

Some people stop at 400 grit wet sanding, but I usually finish with 600 grit, this has provided the best results for me in the past, if the windows are still in the car make sure that you have masked the car properly before you spray any primer, or paint.

Also make sure that you have taken the time to setup your spray gun properly before you spray any paint, or primer, the settings of the gun will make or break the outcome of your primer, or paint work on your car.