We made touch up paint for the car that was the lead car in Denver’s St Patrick’s Day parade. I would like to thank Karen Floyd for her photos of the parade.
I had a chance to see the car after the parade and it is one of the very most impressive cars I have ever seen
For more information and pictures see
The Imperial Club
The Walter P. Chrysler Museum
The Detroit News
and my Flickr page
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
I am stating a new project and would like your help. The car companies have not made it easy to find the paint code. The paint code is not in your vin (vehicle identification number) the dealer can call up your paint code by entering it into their database but it is a pain for you and them.
So where is your paint code? Now it would be logical for the manufactures to get together and standardize where the paint codes are but they can't even standardize them selves. General Motors has at least 19 different places that they hide their paint codes.
So I'm starting to make a web page where you put in the year the make and the model and it will display the resulting location and photo of the tag or sticker that contains the code.
Now this is where I would like your help. First is there a web page out there that already does this, if there is I'll save myself all the work. Second I have pretty good access to where the paint codes are in cars from 2007 back to about 1996 before that the information is much more sketchy if you can contribute to the knowledge base please do. Third take a picture of the paint code of your car and send it to me. Include the make the model and I'll credit you for your help
So far I nominate Honda for the most sane paint code sticker it’s on the driver side door and it simply says color and the code. Volkswagen for the most illusive tag often in the well where the tire is stored and once you’ve found the tag you would never know which number you need.
So please e-mail me at jlyons47@ gmail.com if you can contribute or if you would like to see an advance look at the site.
Right now I have a design that is still a sketch on a napkin and allot of data that I am transcribing and am trying to get into a logical form.
Please send paint code locations you know of, criticism or photo to jlyons47@gmail.com.
Thank you
Are you down to bare metal anywhere? You will want a spray can of self-etching primer for the bare spots. Lets say $9.00 maybe a spray can of adhesion promoter to help paint stick to those problem plastics say $12.00 per spray can
You will probably need some bondo (generic name for polyester body filler) $10.00 to $20.00 /gallon.
Some polyester glazing putty (same thing as bondo but very much more refined very creamy and very smooth for easier sanding) $20.00 to 26.00 / qt
Primer I recommend urethane primer the generic primers are pretty good say $50.00 to $60.00 a gallon they mix a hardener $25.00 to $35.00 a qt and reducer $10.00 a quart. The name brand primers are going to be way more expencive but only marginally better.
Now you may not need to use any bondo or primer but you will need some wax and grease remover to get it really clean $12.00/qt
Okay now to the important question the paint. Dupont, PPG and Sherwin Williams all have thier top of the line paint that is great for color match and if you were painting the fender on a 2004 BMW I'd say go with the paint that is going to match the best. It's the hours of paint matching tecnology that you pay the premium for. But you're doing a complete paint job onan old Chevy Pickup right? Lets use the lower priced paint in Dupont Nason is the economy brand for PPG it's Omni and Sherwin Williams it's Dimension. These paints are substantially less money.
White and black are less expensive than red and yellow and any color that has a lot of pearl is going to be expensive. A gallon of white base coat is going to cost about $100.00 and a gallon of the premium red is well over $500.00 Urethane Clear coat sells from $45.00 to $300.00/gal or more for the high solid European clears. The paint and clear need reducers and hardeners that range from $35.00 a gallon for reducer and $25.00 to $85.00 a quart for clear hardener. Confused yet? I'm not even considering custom paint like House of Kolor or Alsa the sky's the limit with them.
Where I work at Allen Paint we sell a paint kit that has 3 quarts of color 2 quarts of reducer a gallon of clear the hardener for the clear and we throw in a couple of rolls of tape and a couple of sheets of sandpaper for $189.95. We can't make all the colors for that price but we can make about 12,000 colors. We are not the only or even the first paint store to put together a paint kit like this it has been good for our business, we sell a lot of kits every week.
When your shopping for supplies remember that the big paint companies want you to use their system from top to bottom and that makes a lot of sense to them if they are selling to big shops that want the paint companies to stand behind them if there is a paint failure. However no mater what they say any urethane clear coat will work over any urethane base coat and any base coat will work over any urethane primer.
There are lots of little things little expenses sandpaper, tape, masking paper, tack cloth, lacquer thinner for cleaning your gun and please wear a good charcoal respirator. These are serious chemicals not to be taken lightly in some people breathing this stuff even once has been know to bring on chemically induced asthma
When doing major or even minor work on older cars your going to run into rust. The steel that is your car wants to turn itself back into the puffy red iron oxide that it was when it was mined. Whether you’re sanding, sand blasting or chemical striping to get rid of the paint and getting down to the metal the first thing you need to apply to the steel is self etching primer.
Self-etching primer is composed of an acid and zinc. The acid, usually phosphoric acid, forces the zinc down into the top couple of molecules of the steel. Chemically impregnating the steel like this cannot reverse the rust but it can stop in from getting worse. So it’s important that you get all of the scaly rust off.
Wipe the surface with wax and grease remover to get it clean enough so nothing interferes i.e. fingerprints. The self-etching primer is usually gray or olive drab gray but the color is just there to show you where you’ve put it on and it is very thin and one thin coat is enough. Putting more of the primer won’t make it work better. You can apply it over paint or bondo but it is only effective on bare metal. You can apply your high build primer or body filler over the self-etching primer but be careful it is not a finished product by it self.
In other words you can’t apply it and then push the car back outside, it has to have a sealed surface over it, water will reverse the reaction and will pull the zinc back out.
Self-etching primer comes as two parts or ready to spray and also comes in aerosol.
I use it when ever I see bare metal or if I’m putting one metal against another. For instance steel screws in aluminum or on welds.
Now that summer is here we increase the stock of slow reducer and slow urethane hardener at the paint store. There seems to be a good deal of confusion as what slow means.
Automotive paint has a mixture of different solvents and we can adjust the solvency so in the winter when were painting at 60 degrees Fahrenheit we want the solvent to evaporate fast so the paint doesn’t run on us. Now that summer is here and were painting when the temperature is getting up to 90 or 95 we want to slow that solvency way down so the paint droplets will flow out one into the other so we have gloss.
I don’t think it is a good idea to paint when it’s colder than 60 because the chemical process of urethane just about stops at 50 degrees and your paint may never get hard.
And you don’t want to paint when it’s hotter than 95 or so it’s just too uncomfortable wearing protective clothing and respirator. And there is nothing to ruin a good paint job like a drop of sweat falling onto the hood of the car.
Set your self up with 3 or 4 different reducers and cocktail them together to give yourself good flow out and good gloss to meet the conditions of the day.
Every year some one comes into the store and wants to buy a gallon of lacquer primer and says, " I'm just going to prime it now and I'll paint it next summer."
Sounds good, seems to make sense the thing is lacquer primer does not protect the metal and because it is porous it actually holds water against the metal. This is the result.
