You don't have to paint your hood in a NASA-style clean room, but you do need to minimize the dirt in the air to prevent junk drying in your paint. And if a bug is anywhere in the neighborhood, it's guaranteed to land right on your freshly sprayed paint.
Greg O'Brien, Lumberton, NJ: I've been a Car Craft reader for more than 10 years now. I've built several cars, but I've always tried to pick cars with clean bodies because I'm bodywork-o-phobic.
In the past two years, I've been forced to get over my fear of bodywork. A dear friend of the family passed away suddenly, leaving his '64 Falcon two-door sedan sitting in the garage completely stripped and in bare metal! At the request of his family, I was compelled to take the project on and prevent his legacy from rusting away.
In the past year and a half, I've replaced the entire floor, both quarter-panels, and the radiator support, repaired the firewall, minitubbed the rear fenderwells for 325 drag radials, sectioned the rear subframe, welded in subframe connectors, relocated the leaf springs inboard, and drenched it in top-of-the-line epoxy primer to ensure I don't have to do the job twice! At this point, the car is pretty close to being a rolling chassis on all new suspension, four-wheel disc brakes, and a narrowed 8.8-inch rearend.
The next step in the life of the Falcon has me stuck. I want the car to have a clean, purposeful, well-engineered look but the opposite of a show car. I see it as closer to the Two Lane Blacktop look. To achieve this, who better to ask then Car Craft! I'm looking to spray the car in a final coat of black primer, than coat the primer directly with a coat of clear that will settle into a satin/semiflat finish. The goal is a purposefully mechanical look that is protected from the elements, easy to maintain, and clean.
'Cc Quickies
We can't condone the crybaby doll or any other show-car prop, but the guy with the tequila bottle is kind of cool.
I've heard several theories on how to do this, the most credible of which is to mix some type of gloss modifier into the clear that will keep the properties of the clear and just knock down the sheen of the finish. I'm working with a friend who has professional paint experience to do any finish spraying.
Do you know of anybody who is doing this with good results? Exactly what materials and techniques do I need to pull this off the right way the first time? Every time I research this, I am quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of paint products and how the chemicals interact when doing something outside of the generic repaint.
Jeff Smith: You must have missed our Nov. '06 issue, Greg, because the story "How To Black Out a Hood" dealt with this exact issue. Straight primer is porous and does not seal out moisture. Eventually, corrosion will come up through the primer. You can use a self-etching primer on bare metal to create good corrosion resistance. An example of this is DuPont's 22860S, which should be used as the base for a second, two-part primer that is generally used for sanding and filling slight imperfections.
In our story on how to paint a black-out hood, the goal was to create a '60s and early '70s factory-style semigloss look, which sounds like what you are looking for. The advantage of the semigloss clear is that it will protect the otherwise somewhat fragile primer coat. For the story, bodyman Russ Stevenson of Gold Coast Customs used R-M materials. For the base primer, he used a material called PCL PolyPrimer because it's inexpensive and easy to apply to bare metal. Once that had been sprayed and allowed to set for 24 to 48 hours, it was wet-sanded to prep the surface for the topcoat.
Rather than a straight clear, which would create too much of a high gloss, Stevenson uses R-M products UNO HD Mat Black. It's a single-stage paint that does not require a clearcoat. It uses R-M UR50 reducer along with DH42 hardener and an SC804 Mat Black. For the proper matte black, semigloss look, Stevenson mixes four parts paint, one part reducer, and one part hardener. He also uses an high-volume, low-pressure (HVLP) gun to spray. This paint is not cheap, with the reducer and hardeners costing $90 a quart and the paint at around $70 a quart. We've just given you the highlights, but it would be best to review the entire story to get all the semigloss details.