Thread: Followed Me Home, '33 Build

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Denny (DA34Guy) asked about getting everything back together for the 3rd Greybeards run to LA. I got everything primed and blocked, ready for color and decided to shoot the hood, trunk grill and splash aprons first as a test. Splash aprons were first and looked OK - but all of the compound curves just masked what was happening. On the hood I noticed a fisheye type flaw, but big, like a 3/16" soft crater that seemed to be diminishing as it started laying down so I went ahead to the trunk. It was terrible! Many more large soft craters. After about twenty minutes I decided to put a second coat on the hood to see if it would lay flat, but it would not. Something was repelling paint in several places of varying size.

I loaded up the hood and a splash apron and headed to the paint shop, which is also a very good custom paint shop for specialty work. No one could figure out a precise reason for the flaws, but thought that the base was salvageable with some work. Decided to wet sand lightly to open the surface, then shoot a soft bridge coat for adhesion followed by one more color coat. In the process there was an area on the trunk that I found needing more attention, and I spot primed a corner. When I shot the bridge coat of color that corner was the only part that laid down right - the rest seemed to have some type of contaminant in the paint. I re-primed the hood, then shot it using a faster reducer and it laid down right. Clear followed, and it also laid down right. At this point the other four panels have been reprimed, ready to once again sand them for color. As I said in Ken's thread, one step forward, two steps back, but the hood looks pretty good!

The plan is to re-shoot the little pieces, then shoot a small area on the body & doors to be sure the problem's gone. My idea is that the reducer I used in the first batch of color was a previously opened can (less than 1/2 full), and that it had either absorbed moisture or evaporated some of the volatiles, changing the chemistry in the color coat that was present even after it had dried overnight.