Alright gents, here’s the update as promised, albeit a bit late. The car took forever to unmask tonight, almost as long as it took to mask due to the complexity of the areas.
I’m not blowing my own horn, but it would appear that I’ve somehow miraculously pulled off the impossible. Last night after work and dinner, I went out to the Rktpwrd Skunkworks and evaluated the situation. Car was finished masked up and just waiting for me to do something amazing. Talk about pressure.
I actually had butterflies in my stomach, something I haven’t had since walking into the booth to spray for the first time many many years ago.
The door handles and the header panel trim spear were going to need sprayed too, so I began by laying them out on the trunk lid:
Once everything was thoroughly prepped, cleaned, blown and tacked off, all the parts got hit with a coat of Bulldog adhesion promoter. From there, I grabbed the silver base coat tinter I had picked up for the mouldings, and cut it 1:1 with the required reducer. Doing a couple of tests to check the spray pattern and viscosity, I noticed that it was quite transparent.
Hmmm. This could possibly work to my advantage!
Beginning with the repaired area on the passenger’s side belt moulding, I gradually laid on successive coats building up the coverage and finish. The color was (thankfully) a remarkable match to the mouldings! Once I was satisfied that the repaired area had adequate hiding, I blended out the color in successive passes at each end.
This wasn’t the plan I had going in, but since it was appearing to work in my favour, I just ran with it.
The passenger’s side moulding, after the first couple passes:
Not exactly remarkable yet, but it definitely had promise. However, once I had completed the blending process here’s how it looked:
Much better!!
The area where the repair was, that got the most amount of color:
To illustrate the benefit of blending the color out towards the ends, here’s the front of the same moulding. Note how you can still mostly see the brushed finish.
If you look closely enough, you can see a faint trace of the silver on the quarter glass moulding as I blended the color off in this pic:
At this point, I was simply ecstatic that this was all working out. So in order to have the other side match, I gave the driver’s side a couple of very light, thin coats of the silver as well to make sure that both sides looked the same:
Of course I couldn’t forget the header panel spear, it was painted entirely because there was no original finish underneath. The handles were covered up during the silver shoot, I didn’t want any overspray on them.
Next up was the clear coat. I mixed up a pint of the clear with approximately 20-30% of flattening agent in it to create the matte finish, and hit the door handles first after uncovering them:
They turned out incredible!
Just one pic of the clear coat done and still masked up. Still quite glossy here as it was fresh and hadn’t had time to flatten out yet:
Fast forward to tonight, after coming out to the shop and inspecting the end result, I wasn’t entirely happy with the amount of gloss the mouldings still had.
It took some considerable courage to do so, but after some experimentation on the header panel spear, I found that two light passes with a grey ScotchBrite pad knocked down the gloss perfectly and put the brushed marks back on.
Not 3 passes, that dulled it down a little too much, but 2. That left just the right amount of gloss on the parts.
Some eye candy with it unmasked and the mouldings lightly scuffed:
Check this out: The painted, clear coated, and scuffed driver side belt moulding, together with the natural finish brushed “A” pillar mouldings:
Looks like a dead nuts match to me!!
With everything coming together so nicely and the painting processes finished, I was finally able to install the proper (and recently finished) drip rail mouldings as well. Looks good now that all the parts are present and installed.
So that’s it, my incredible news for this week! Tomorrow I’ll reinstall the door handles and locks, all with the new gaskets and hardware. If I get time and the lighting is decent, I’ll try and pull the car out to see and get pics of everything together in some natural light.
Let me know what y’all think about how it turned out!
Thanks for following along and commenting friends.
D.
