The Great Pumpkin - '71 Duster
Got the front wheel wells coated with the Raptor Liner yesterday. In all honesty, I almost felt kind of dumb about doing it because the nice new paint got covered up but that is essentially the way the factory did it. The coating was put on relatively thin so there's little in the way of added weight. In fact, it's thin enough that it did not even cover the paint drips. If I wasn't concerned about adding the weight back I'd have used the schutz gun to make the Raptor Liner thicker or even would have used regular undercoating. It remains to be seen how well the thined-out liner will protect the surfaces from road debris. This car won't be driven 25K miles a year in bad weather on gravelly dirt roads so I'm not too concerned about it. I'm just happy it's clean.
I've read that when the wheel wells were done on the assembly line, the workers had a template they'd hold over the control arm mount areas to keep the undercoating off of those surfaces so that's how I did it. A cardboard template was cut out to mimic the contours in the sheet metal and the material was shot behind it giving the feathered look. If you tape/mask off the area then you'd get a hard line which to me would not look right. No, it's obviously not a "factory correct" replication but you get the idea.
To prevent over spray onto the nice new engine bay paint, I taped over all the visible openings on the inner fenders. Naturally I missed two places when I failed to cover the exposed hood hinge opening so a little over spray got on the areas where the cowl meets the fender. There was also an opening between the sheet metal pieces at the back of the left side inner fender where it meets the firewall that some over spray got through. I'm hoping since just a little bit got on these areas they can be buffed clean.
Driver's side.
Passenger side.
In any event, that pretty much wraps up the paint project. I started this whole endeavor back in January of this year (2022). The hope was to have it done by summer and potentially be driving the car by now but clearly that was out the window a few months ago. In between January and now a lot of life stuff happened so I wasn't able to dedicate as much time to it as I would have wanted but that's the way it goes.
Hard to say exactly how long it took because there were long stretches of time where nothing got done. The takeaway form all this is that painting a car "the right way" is really labor intensive and just takes a long time to do. I also tend to get caught up in perfectionism which never fails to add extra time to whatever it is I'm doing.
The whole job was done the hard way by stripping everything by hand and then having to go back and redo a lot of it after being dissatisfied with the initial result. Cleaning the surfaces of the old paint and undercoating was really tedious and difficult to get 100% spotless by hand. Trying not to mar the original exterior paint added complexity and time to the job because care had to be taken to protect it from whatever was being done underneath and in the engine bay. I've said it a few times already but next time I decide to paint a car it's getting media blasted spotless and then put on a rotisserie. I also do not recommend doing this type of work under a car that's on a lift, it's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. Overall though, the goal of having everything clean and fresh was achieved so mission accomplished.
I didn't take any pictures but I did start putting some parts back on like body plugs, hood bumpers etc. It's nice to get these little bits and pieces off the shelf and out of the way. Right now I'm trying to come up with a plan for reassembly. It's probably wisest to get the wiring in place first since that's generally underneath most of the other systems. However, I'm sure some things will need to be in place to determine wire length and placement so it may be hard to stick to one definitive method. I'll probably just figure it out as I go like always.
More to come.
Got the front wheel wells coated with the Raptor Liner yesterday. In all honesty, I almost felt kind of dumb about doing it because the nice new paint got covered up but that is essentially the way the factory did it. The coating was put on relatively thin so there's little in the way of added weight. In fact, it's thin enough that it did not even cover the paint drips. If I wasn't concerned about adding the weight back I'd have used the schutz gun to make the Raptor Liner thicker or even would have used regular undercoating. It remains to be seen how well the thined-out liner will protect the surfaces from road debris. This car won't be driven 25K miles a year in bad weather on gravelly dirt roads so I'm not too concerned about it. I'm just happy it's clean.
I've read that when the wheel wells were done on the assembly line, the workers had a template they'd hold over the control arm mount areas to keep the undercoating off of those surfaces so that's how I did it. A cardboard template was cut out to mimic the contours in the sheet metal and the material was shot behind it giving the feathered look. If you tape/mask off the area then you'd get a hard line which to me would not look right. No, it's obviously not a "factory correct" replication but you get the idea.
To prevent over spray onto the nice new engine bay paint, I taped over all the visible openings on the inner fenders. Naturally I missed two places when I failed to cover the exposed hood hinge opening so a little over spray got on the areas where the cowl meets the fender. There was also an opening between the sheet metal pieces at the back of the left side inner fender where it meets the firewall that some over spray got through. I'm hoping since just a little bit got on these areas they can be buffed clean.
Driver's side.
Passenger side.
In any event, that pretty much wraps up the paint project. I started this whole endeavor back in January of this year (2022). The hope was to have it done by summer and potentially be driving the car by now but clearly that was out the window a few months ago. In between January and now a lot of life stuff happened so I wasn't able to dedicate as much time to it as I would have wanted but that's the way it goes.
Hard to say exactly how long it took because there were long stretches of time where nothing got done. The takeaway form all this is that painting a car "the right way" is really labor intensive and just takes a long time to do. I also tend to get caught up in perfectionism which never fails to add extra time to whatever it is I'm doing.
The whole job was done the hard way by stripping everything by hand and then having to go back and redo a lot of it after being dissatisfied with the initial result. Cleaning the surfaces of the old paint and undercoating was really tedious and difficult to get 100% spotless by hand. Trying not to mar the original exterior paint added complexity and time to the job because care had to be taken to protect it from whatever was being done underneath and in the engine bay. I've said it a few times already but next time I decide to paint a car it's getting media blasted spotless and then put on a rotisserie. I also do not recommend doing this type of work under a car that's on a lift, it's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. Overall though, the goal of having everything clean and fresh was achieved so mission accomplished.
I didn't take any pictures but I did start putting some parts back on like body plugs, hood bumpers etc. It's nice to get these little bits and pieces off the shelf and out of the way. Right now I'm trying to come up with a plan for reassembly. It's probably wisest to get the wiring in place first since that's generally underneath most of the other systems. However, I'm sure some things will need to be in place to determine wire length and placement so it may be hard to stick to one definitive method. I'll probably just figure it out as I go like always.
More to come.