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

Since we left the majority of the original filler in place, we used Evercoat metal glaze that we mixed on a Bondo board to level out the surface. The more cream hardener you add, the faster it dries, so we just added a "bird turd"-sized glop to the glaze and mixed it.

A light skim coat of metal glaze provides a better surface than heavyweight filler, goes on evenly, is easier to sand, and leaves virtually zero pinholes. It's more like a topcoat for regular filler that you can sand and prime. We used metal spreader to pull the glaze across the middle of the old filler. If you are working with an edge, start at the body line and work away from it to help keep it intact.

After 20 minutes of drying time, we roughed out high spots in the glaze with 120-grit on a round Dura-Block and then dry block-sanded it with 320-grit paper. If you need to, you can clean the area with 3M Adhesive Remover, add more glaze, and repeat the process until you can't feel any bumps or waves.

We taped off the area and used DuPont primer-filler that we shot from a gun. When working with several small repair areas, it's better to fill the entire panel with one even coat. It's quicker and easier to build up the primer this way than with an aerosol can, and it makes block-sanding easier.

There is a difference between fixing rock chips and scratches on an existing paint job and doing it during a total repaint. The former is covered on page 50 and works with topcoats and buffers instead of primer and sandpaper. We used metal glaze for chips or scratches with dings and high-build primer where there was no damage to the surrounding sheetmetal. The scratch on the door had damaged the paint only, so we used the primer method to make it disappear.

Using SEM high-build primer, we added four coats with 2-3 minutes between coats to build up the area in and around the scratch. The primer needs one hour to dry before sanding and topcoating, so move around the car and build up all the paint nicks at once to save time later.

Using a blocking board and 320-grit paper, we dry-sanded in a crosshatch pattern until the scratch simply disappeared.

We sanded and shot the area twice to take out several small scratches and chips at the same time. When sanding, never do it in a straight line; always move diagonally to avoid digging a trench.

To fix a dent, you can pull it with a unispotter, hammer it out from the backside, or fill it in. Since this one wasn't very deep, we decided to use more of the metal glaze to repair it.