Paint Your Car at Home

It Has to Begin Somewhere
The key to any backyard project is to start with something that is reasonably sound to begin with. This particular El Camino was in fairly decent shape but still needed hours of tweaks before it was ready for paint. Once the El Camino was placed in the side yard alongside the house, everyone had a hand in searching for dents, wrinkles, and any general sheetmetal malaise. Once all the kinks made themselves known, the real work began. We started by unbolting all the sheetmetal, removing the trim and emblems, and stripping the paint.

Here's the El Camino hunkered down alongside Jim Peterson's house. Despite having two garages at his house, the bodywork was all done outside.	Stripping the paint can be accomplished several ways, but the quickest (if not nastiest) method is chemical stripper. We used a couple of gallons of aircraft stripper and several disposable paintbrushes. Lay the stripper on thick, let the chemicals work for about 10-15 minutes, and then scrape the lifted paint off with a Bondo spreader as shown, or with a gasket scraper.
Once the major layers are removed, you will no doubt find some rust. This is a rust hole in the lower corner behind the right front fender.	If the corrosion is not too bad, cut it out and make a fabricated patch to repair the hole as shown here. We used a Craftsman home 110-volt MIG welder to carefully stitch-weld the panel back in place, overlapping the welds to complete the repair. Then the excess weld was ground down to finish the metalwork.
The left front fender rusted in the same spot but the corrosion was far worse and required more major surgery. We grafted a whole new patch panel from OPG to the bottom of the fender to repair the fender like new.	The tailgate had a couple of bad spots where a screw-in dent puller had been used. We borrowed an inexpensive Uni-Spotter Stud welder to spot-weld pins near the dent and then used a slide hammer dent puller to carefully work the wrinkled tin. With finesse, this tool is a great timesaver. Then we removed the studs and the small weld spots and grinded it smooth.