dash panels and similar interior components.) Of course you’ve removed everything detachable from the outside, including bumpers, grille, lights, handles, trim, and so on. For this stage we recommend removing the hood, trunk, and front fenders, because they are relatively easy. The doors are your call, because they are much harder to replace and realign. Same with things like the engine and wiring (it depends on how much you want to detail and paint the firewall and engine compartment). And, though it’s highly recommended, paint stripping is also optional in this stage. If existing paint is new or original, you can just sand it all down (thus retaining factory-applied rust-inhibitors and undercoats). In this step it’s more important to get new paint everywhere (i.e., under window seals, in doorjambs) that the factory originally put it.
6. Body-Off-Frame. This is the whole enchilada. There’s no point doing it unless the car really needs it and is worth it. But if you’re going this far, you might as well start (once you’ve got everything torn apart) by stripping the body either by immersion or by media blasting (if available—by hand, if not), inside and out. Might as well have the frame and chassis components sandblasted, too. Paint or powder coat the frame and suspension parts before reassembly, and paint driveline components as you rebuild them. Do whatever rust repair and bodywork is needed, and then paint all sheetmetal, top and bottom, inside and out. Then start reassembling the whole car with all new rubber, wiring, glass, upholstery, plating, and so on. This can all be done at home, with the possible exceptions of plating, upholstery, and probably glass. It is still exponentially cheaper than having a pro shop do it all. But don’t expect to do this during your two-week summer vacation.
TO STRIP OR NOT TO STRIP
This car is for sale at a swap meet, and some sellers can be cagey (this one appears to have waxed the car to make it shiny); but we see no rust, no dents, no cracks, and no flakes. It looks like a candidate for a good sanding and a new paint job. You can get such a car for a much lower price and do the paint yourself.
Of all the cars I’ve painted, the only ones I’ve had no problems with, either immediately or later, were the ones I stripped to bare metal to begin with. This could be coincidence. But more likely it has to do with what lay below the surface of the dragged-home derelict vehicles that I didn’t strip. Lord knows where they had been and how many times they had been painted.
When you’re starting a paint project you once again have a few options. First, let’s assume you know, or are pretty confident, that the paint on the car is either factory original or a respray that was done properly in the past, and there is no evidence of cracking, checking, peeling, bubbling, or so on. If this is the case, you can usually sand down the paint on the car, smoothly and evenly, and paint over it using most of today’s modern paints. If the existing finish is still relatively new and in good shape, and you just want to change the color or put something like a pearl coat over it (as we show later), then sanding down the existing paint and recovering it should be fine. Don’t forget that some new cars get damaged and spot-painted—sometimes even body-worked—at the dealer before being sold. Hopefully such work has been done properly, with good catalyzed paints, primers, and sealers. If so, it can be painted over like the rest of the car. If not, you probably won’t know it until it wrinkles or lifts while you’re painting the car. Similarly, if the original paint, or a good repaint, is just faded, or possibly the clear is peeling in places, you can sand it down and repaint it the same color (including a base coat and a clear coat), without having to repaint the doorjambs, under the hood, and so on. Further, when the car is built at the factory, the body and other sheet-metal components are dipped, electrostatically sprayed, or otherwise treated with rust-protective coats and other primers that are tougher and better-bonded than anything you can buy and spray at home (it’s the same for bodyshops or custom painters). So some painters suggest not stripping the vehicle to bare metal (especially inside-and-out, as in immersion stripping), so that you don’t remove these tough factory undercoats. It’s a debatable point.
The second—and usually better—option is to thoroughly sand whatever paint is on the car, then cover it with a good sealer followed by a modern catalyzed primer. Actually, if the existing surface sands down nice and smooth, you could spray a coat of catalyzed sealer over it (preferably a colored sealer of a shade close to the final paint color, if the sanded surface ends up multi-colored), followed by the new paint. However, most cars needing a paint job also have dings, door dents, scrapes, or other surface problems that won’t simply sand out. So most often, if you’re going to paint over existing paint, we suggest sanding it down with relatively coarse paper (180 to 220 grit), and then either shooting the whole body (preferably), or just any rough, dinged, or bodyworked areas, with a good, catalyzed, high-fill primer. If the paint on the car is multilayer, old, or otherwise edgy, give yourself extra insurance and add a coat of sealer before the primer. Then you can use some catalyzed spot putty where necessary over the primer and start block sanding, as we detail in following chapters. Most of my early paint problems, when painting over existing finishes without stripping, occurred because I was using lacquer primer and lacquer paint. We talk more about this later, but lacquer solvents are extremely aggressive, and lift or wrinkle all kinds of underlying paints, especially older non-catalyzed ones, including old lacquer. For both of these reasons, modern paints really are better, especially if you’re spraying it over existing paint.
Here’s a similar car that has been sanded and partly stripped, ready for new paint. Assuming it’s all straight and smooth, I’d spray some sealer on any bare metal spots (if not the whole car, just to be sure), and then mask and spray color. This is exactly what we did with several cars as teens (short of taking glass out). We then had them sprayed by a local painter, with never any problems. With your own garage and equipment, you can do the painting yourself.
Here’s that Nomad again. As we say in the text, there’s no point stripping or grinding out someone else’s filler (undoing work already done) if it’s done relatively well. You can see from the waves in the reflection in the side of this car that (1) it has filler in it, and (2) it needs further block/board sanding to get it as straight as it should be. But the paint’s been on the car a good while, and there’s no rust coming through, no cracks, and none of the filler is falling out (which does happen). We’d recommend sanding with 80-grit on a long board until it’s pretty straight, then spraying with high-fill primer and blocking again with 180-grit.
The third option is iffy and always debatable. It pertains to older vehicles, or ones that you know have been damaged and bodyworked. But in this case the exterior surface, whether it’s fresh and shiny, old and faded, or maybe in a coat of primer, looks relatively smooth and straight and shows no evidence of cracking, bubbling, rust, or other badness. If the surface is shiny and fresh, and you want to repaint it, I can only assume you just bought the car and paid for a paint job you didn’t want. Don’t compound the issue (in my opinion) by immediately stripping this paint off only to find what you consider to be an excessive amount of filler underneath. Lots of good paint jobs, even by big-name builders, have filler under them. It’s the most expedient way to get a super-straight show-winning body and paint job. But the majority of these cars are stripped to bare metal to begin with, metal-worked pretty close, and then the filler and other undercoats are added properly. If you strip all this off, you’re just erasing several man-hours
