Painting A 1967 AMC Rambler On A Budget - Paint Your Car for $1,016

Because there was a heavy coat of primer under the original paint job, the DA and 80-grit disc ground a canyon into the area. We used 150-grit to feather the transition from bare metal to the original paint and eliminate the rough edge.

You can see the different layers under the topcoat. Working from the center out, you can see a factory corrosion-protection layer, the lighter gray is original primer, the first blue is the original paint, and finally, a respray build-up primer, the newest old Barbados Blue, and a clearcoat. These layers create quite a ledge between the repair area and the topcoat, requiring the feathering with the 150. A light skim of metal glaze must be applied directly to the dent and carried out beyond the edge of the topcoat. Otherwise, you get a dip between where the paint ends and the glaze begins. The glaze on the original paint will sand off easily.

For huge, flat areas, nothing beats a really big board. Using 150 to knock down the high spots, we smoothed the entire area with 320 and Eastwood's 21-inch flexible sanding board. Again, don't dig a trench; move on a diagonal.

We gunned each area of major repair with two coats of primer. It's OK to spray a larger area than the original repair because when you wet-sand later, the primer over the repair and the original paint will be sanded to the same level.

The Rambler actually had a good side that required no dent or scratch repair. It did have some small waves from the last repaint, so we knocked those down with 320 paper on a long board. The idea is to scuff the surface so the new paint can be applied directly over the old stuff.

In the Feb. '07 issue, Russ Stevenson used a hammer, dolly, and fire to straighten the passenger fender. The area was left in black primer for rust protection, but that was all. We put a skim coat on the transition between the repaired area and the original paint and blocked the black primer down to the coat of filler that was added during the dent repair.

After block-sanding, the high spots will end up being straight sheetmetal. The idea is to avoid applying primer or topcoats to any bare metal, so we added a light coat of SEM self-etching primer to cover the holes. The alternative is skimming the entire area with filler and blocking it down, which will eliminate any waviness but is a lot more work.

We performed major glaze and primer work to fix the cracks in the rear quarter-panel and managed to blur the killer Rambler body line. To get it back, we used 320 on a sanding board and sanded toward the line going up and toward the line going down the body. To make it easier, you can add a line of tape as a guide.

Now that the entire car has been either repaired and primed or block-sanded with 320, it is a good time to search every inch of the car for any dings and add some glaze or high-build primer. The next step is wet-sanding.