Thread: Questions about paint, way ahead of time

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Guys, probably in the spring we'll be ready to have the 51' F1 painted, I of course am always curious about things and thought I could ask my questions now.

first I'll tell you what the plan is. right now we have everything off except the cab (which we need on to fabricate power steering and install PB, column etc. and get it all right). we are going to rebuild the bed, do a bit of metal replacement on the fenders before having somebody else do the body work. Then we'll put it back together to check fit and do some last minute fab. that we need it together to get done. after that we planned on stripping it down again for paint.

In short, body work should be almost totally complete and the body will be apart in pieces already for the paint. My questions:

1. What is needed for a good paint job (my gallery has the photoshopped image of the paint scheme we are thinking about. Creme body with chocolate brown fenders and running boards. I thought that a little gold flake in the chocolate would set it off well too.), i.e. base coats, clear coat, number of each, wet sand afterwards??? I know very little about all of this.

2. What would a good quality paint job cost, not show stopper type, but good well done job? (if PPG is good we can save on materials, my cousin works for a distributor and could probably get us a great price on it).

3. We're thinking about having some airbrushing done on the door, like in the pic, when is best to have that done, before or after the clear coat(s)?

thanks guys!!!

Red

As far as the airbrush work, I usually do that last after the base color has been applied. I usually use base/clear when I am doing graphics, so that would mean sanding the clear coat on the doors and re-clearing once the graphic work has been finished up.

If I were doing the airbrush work, I would prefer the doors off the cab so that both doors could be worked on at the same time and I could position as needed on the work bench.

Dave Brisco
Dangerous DesignWorx

You mean you miss some clear with the base color? what does that do, make it harder?

I was thinking we'd just take the doors to whoever does the airbrushing, figuring it'll have to be re-cleared off the truck anyways. What ballpark are we looking at for the pinup on the door? I have a friend whose brother does a lot of custom paint work and would probably cut me a deal, but I don't know how good he is with pinups.

thanks.

Red

Personally I think your truck will look better without the metal flake.
Just deep rich color coats.

There is a clear that is used during the painting process. It is called "intercoat clear", or interim clear", and some call it "base clear". By shotting that over the base color, you protect the color, by preventing people from doing something that will show later...like sanding the colored basecoat.

I would recommend painting the whole truck at the same time so that all of your base colors match... Then clear the whole truck. Once the doors have been based and cleared then send them to your Airbrush guy. He will then sand the surface of the clear coat so that the paint will stick then do a final clear over the doors when the graphics are finished. That is how I would do it.

Actually we would shoot several coats of clear so that once we color sanded and buffed the doors the graphics would totally flat, no ridges around the edges. Sometimes it the graphics are really built up we will shoot as many as 9 coats of clear so that once it is sanded out it is completely flat!

As far as a ballpark on the cost of the graphic work it is really hard to say because it all depends on the skill level of the artist. Someone who is really good with those types of graphics is going to be in higher demand and require a higher rate. With airbrush graphics, you get what you pay for - quality work costs more! Looking at your digital rendering I would guess that we might charge around $2000 including materials, but I am sure there are lots of painters who would estimate less and some that would estimate more.

Dave Brisco
Dangerous DesignWorx

Thanks guys, I really appreciate it. I'm hoping that my wife will let me pay for the paint out of our tax return. I have a couple of leads too, one friend's brother works at a paint shop and said they might be able to work something out if we had all body work done and they could just shoot it on a slow day.

Also, the guy that we bought the truck from had some custom airbrush work done on his sedan he's building, the kid (early 20's) that did it is trying to get more of his work out there for people to see so did it for a good price, I'll check him out too.

Dave, do you include the color sanding in that or is that extra?

Also, the main paint job, without gold flake, what would that run ballpark? local hotrod shop uses a guy that is getting 10k per car, way way too pricey for us, and like I said, we aren't entering the autorama.

Red

When we price out a project to a customer the price includes all materials and labor including color sanding and final buffing.

Dave Brisco