Easy Paint & Body

Wow! Talk about adding personality. It’s almost too nice to ever think about doing another burnout again. Yeah right. Where’s the trailer?

With the headlamp and taillamp housings removed, Jorge Martinez and Manuel Lemuz of Same Day Auto Painting began by fixing the minor parking lot dings that had accumulated throughout the years. It’s always better to start with an oxidized original paint job than a crappy “shiny” one—especially since the unknown work below the paint can quickly become a nightmare for the body shop and your wallet. A late model like this 5.0L has had far fewer years to gather the scars of old age.

Lemuz (left) and Martinez (right) first sanded areas that had minor imperfections and applied lightweight body filler to straighten the body. Once the bodywork was finished, any surface area exposing bare metal was immediately covered with self-etching primer to prevent any future corrosion and to promote better paint adhesion.

Although most of the body of this 12-year-old car was in terrific shape, the rear hatch wasn’t. The original owner of our ’89 Mustang had placed a ridiculous double-stacker Super Street–style wing on it. Replacing this atrocity with a more “tasteful” and “subtle” model left several holes that had to be filled with Marglass body filler.

The next step was to spray the entire car with primer surfacer. We used PPG’s low-VOC and California legal NCP 280 primer mixed with NCX 285 hardener. Here Martinez checks the evenness of the surface area by spraying a quick guidecoat (a light haze of black paint speckled onto the surface area). After the guidecoat is sanded, the remaining paint reveals low spots that will require another coat of primer surfacer to level out. If for some reason the surface area is still too low, you can use a thicker, lacquer-based, primer-compatible putty to cure this. The above photo shows that the guidecoat was completely removed, indicating a smooth, level surface area.

Here’s a neat little trick to save your existing rubber door trim, which on our car was in relatively good shape except for the warped ends. Rather than replace the entire piece, Same Day used two screws (arrows) to flatten the ends.

Add a little body filler before the primer surfacer and voilá…good as new!

Once the bodywork is complete, the final body prepping consists of wet-sanding the primer surfacer first with 360-grit 3M sandpaper and then with a finer 600-grit. This’ll remove orange peel and ensure a perfectly smooth finish for the basecoat.

Once in the paint booth, painter Saul Valencia masked the entire car, applied DX 330 pre-cleaner all over the body panels, and wiped the surface with a tack cloth to remove any impurities before spraying the PPG Ford Dark Shadow Blue Metallic basecoat (DBU3946). Since we live in highly regulated sunny SoCal, Valencia will generally mix a 1:1 ratio of basecoat and reducer, but it’s the spray pattern that will ultimately determine the ideal mixture.

A fleeting 90 minutes later, the basecoat is finished. There’s no reflectance in the basecoat, which carries only the color, so the paint appears dull and flat at this stage. Grant told us “Just wait until the clear goes on. You’ll be amazed!”

Our ace Flame dude is Patrick Ceo. Ceo begins by laying down vinyl transfer tape over the areas he intends to apply the flames. Unlike some custom graphic artists who use overlay patterns, Ceo sketches the flame design freehand.

Once the layout is drawn to Ceo’s liking, he cuts the vinyl tape along the sketch and removes the excess, revealing the pattern and exposing the flame area to be painted.

After masking off the front end of the car, Ceo applies the first of several custom color mixtures with a spray gun using PPG’s line of Organic paints. The primary color is Sunrise Yellow mixed with a touch of white to create the look of a white-hot flame.

Ceo gradually progresses through four additional color layers ranging from a light to dark orange, with touches of yellow and red.

Finally, Ceo outlines each flame individually with the primary color using an airbrush. This not only blends the flames back into the front of the car, but also separates them from the basecoat to create the illusion of motion.

Although we witnessed the production ourselves, we’re still rubbing our eyes in disbelief at the fact that Ceo’s handiwork took a mere 5-1/2 hours! Now it’s back to the paint booth to receive a final clearcoat over the flames. While the industry standard is to spray three coats of clear over a two-stage basecoat/clearcoat paint job, Valencia sprayed five liberal coats of clear to cover the additional layers of paint applied for the flames. After wet-sanding, there will be no noticeable ridge between the flames and the basecoat.

After allowing the clearcoat to cure, Martinez first wet-sands with 800-grit 3M sandpaper over the flames using plenty of water as a lubricant. Next he goes over the entire car with 1,000-grit. Although it’s a time-consuming process, color-sanding rids the paint of any flaws like drips or orange peel and produces a smooth, mirror-like finish.

Self-expression and creativity are two things that inspire car junkies like us to dole out excessive sums of cash and abnormal amounts of time and energy building and pampering our daily drivers and weekend projects. Some people can’t get enough grunt from their big-blocks during cruises down Main Street.

Others simply want to see how far they can push the limits of performance. The more detail-oriented among us may prefer to show off the shiny side at car shows. Is one expression of car crafting better than the other? No way. But putting together a complete package is a feat that often escapes even those of us with the best intentions.

With the lion’s share of time and money expended on the single-minded task of going fast, dedicated dragstrip cars are notorious for being weak in the looks department. Seeing as how it was time for our annual Paint and Body section, we decided to do something a little different this year by using an actual race car (see “Car Craft Goes Racing,” Feb. ’01) as an artistic canvas and how-to test bed. We opted to forgo traditional snore-inducing monochrome colors like black, red, or yellow because we wanted something really eye-catching. To do this, we went to Same Day Auto Painting in Newhall, California, to have the wild retina-burning flame scheme shown on these pages applied. But don’t let the name fool you—owner Frank Bennetti and shop manager Jim Grant are quite diverse in their talents, and can do everything from a $369 “same day” job to custom two-stage paint jobs consisting of a basecoat with a clear overlay starting at $2,800.

Unbeknownst to us before we showed up at his shop with our car on the trailer, Bennetti and Same Day Auto Painting have already attained celebrity status.

Located in the heart of Southern California’s entertainment industry with Hollywood just over the hill, Bennetti has been the hired gun for a number of movie and television productions. Remember the ultra-cool ’65 Vette with the American flag paint scheme in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me ? That’s his work. How about the convertible Hemi ’Cuda in the TV show Nash Bridges ? That’s his too (he actually did four of them for the show just in case those goofy Hollywood guys decided to blow one up for fun). This is just the tip of the iceberg. The list goes on with other big-name productions including Casino, Thelma & Louise, Hoover, and the syndicated television show V.I.P. featuring Pamela Anderson (Bennetti has her autographed picture on his wall). Needless to say, we were extremely confident that Bennetti and his crew could turn our tin can into something a lot more lively. So follow along and prepare to be dazzled by a little Hollywood magic from Same Day Auto Painting. And check out How To Paint Flames Video to view some video clips of the painters in action.