How to Paint Your Own Car

With tension still on the chains, Ferre struck the backside of the secondary dent to relieve the tension in the sheet metal in that area. Once the tension there is relieved, the initial dent can be fixed. In other words, all the dents in the taillight panel need to be worked out together rather than treated as three separate dents to be hammered out one at a time.

With the chains off the car, Ferre checked the work so far. He showed the students that the most efficient work isn't necessarily the fastest. Taking time to check progress often helps avoid mistakes. Also, with a panel as badly damaged as ours, you'll need to look for clues to figure out how the it's supposed to look. From the factory, the taillight panel on our Mustang had a strong inverse vertical curve, but it also curves in slightly along the horizontal line above the bumper mounts. This is important to know because the temptation would be to pull until that line is straight. Instead, we needed to square up the gas tank opening in the trunk floor just behind the taillight panel, leaving a slight inward horizontal curve at the bumper mounts.

The chains went back for one final pull. Please note that you don't need your own frame machine to do this work, so you can stop filling out that loan application. Be creative. The key is to figure out how to apply force to the dent in the opposite direction of the force that created it. This can also be done by pushing on the dent with a hydraulic bottle jack or a Port-O-Power. We've even heard of people chaining the car to tie-downs in the garage floor and pulling on it with a pickup truck.

Be aware that the force of an impact like the one to the back of our Mustang can travel through the car's entire body, especially in a unibody car. Check the whole car for ripples and waviness, paying close attention to the quarterpanels, sail panels and roof. Also, look for misalignment of the doors and body gaps. The Mustang had two small creases in the left quarter-panel that were a direct result of the hit to the rear. Ferre hammered them out while the chains were still attached to the rear of the car.

The students took the Mustang off the frame machine when the taillight panel was close enough to be finished by hand. At this point, the front fenders were removed and inspected. since there was only minor surface rust, they were cleaned up with a wire brush, and coated with Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator.

Meanwhile, the students block-sanded the rest of the car with 80-grit sandpaper. Though the Mustang had at least three paint jobs already, the paint was in pretty good shape-no peeling or flaking, so we could paint over it rather than stripping it all off.

We treated the old paint as if it were a layer of fillerprimer. Block sanding it took most of the waviness out of the sides of the car. You can see by the different colors around the door handle openings and around the side vents where the high and low spots from the previous paint jobs were.