Scott Fisher's Painting Right & Wrong

Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 22:48:16 -0400
From: SEFisher@aol.com
Subject: How To Tell Right From Wrong

This summer, I've been taking a course in the right and wrong ways to destroy a car's finish, in the form of removing the several layers of badly sunburned and oxidized paint from my 1967 Alfa Romeo GT 1300 Junior. Yes, I know it's not British, but I'm doing this to practice restoring the bodywork on my '64 MGB over the winter, when it'll be too nasty to drive the roadster, and the Alfa's paint was uglier to start with, and besides I can't remember the whole address for the i-cars list, and my dog ate my -- whoops, sorry, some old tapes started running there. Also I think I have more friends on this list, though after this introduction I could be wrong.

Right now, BTW, the car is almost unbelievably hideous; it's got pale, pale aqua as the factory color, a deep garnet over that, a browner garnet where the clearcoat hadn't peeled off, a medium blue guide coat (which I applied WAAAAY too thick, in case it looked good enough that I could say it was the color coat), orange primer over parts of the car but not the whole thing, and occasional dabs of brick-red glazing putty, as well as a sort of pale grout-colored layer that I presume is Bondo. Oh, and the driver's side front fender and the shelf across the nose are navy blue under the garnet color. The welds are pretty straight, I have to say that; we figure the new front clip was put on when the car was still new enough that people cared about doing a good job with it. Where I've been sanding it, though, the layers show through in weird patterns that look sort of like smooth fractals. (Bronwen, bless her four-year-old soul, thinks it's great; "Dad, leave the Alfa like this! It looks like a sunset!") But I love it, because I'm actually doing something with it rather than letting it sit and stay ugly (even if I'm still making it uglier for a while), and I'm actually getting almost good at this. By the time I finish this car, I think I'll be able to tell people truthfully that I've done four complete strip, sand, and paint jobs, all of them on this Alfa.

Anyway, here we go with Lessons from the Driveway, or, Everything I Really Need To Know I Learned in Home Depot:

Spraying color over an existing bad paint job, which results in shiny new paint that has all the high and low spots that were already there and merely puts them up in the airstream so that the new paint can get chipped off easily by passing butterflies and stray neutrinos, is Wrong.

Removing the bad paint first is Right.

Spraying primer over patches and then sanding it to get it all the same level is Wrong.

Removing the high spots before painting, so that everything starts out the same level, is Right.

Sanding just the boundaries of the peeling clear-coat, which is the worst of the high-low layer conditions on the car, and yet which merely results in new areas of the clear-coat oxidizing and peeling off after you've sanded them to a nice feathered edge, is Wrong.

Removing the whole damn mess and starting fresh is Right.

Sanding a car with a rotary sanding wheel on an air gun, letting the edges of the wheel skitter over the paint and take crescent-shaped gouges out of paint, primer, filler and metal is Wrong.

Sanding a car with a jitterbug sander and wet emery paper is Right.

Using sandpaper for most of your paint removal is Wrong.

Using Jasco Paint Stripper for most of your paint removal is Right.

Using a scraper to peel off ribbons of the softened paint, which results in skating the edge over the surface and taking gouges out of the unsoftened paint and the filler and even the metal if you decide to get really serious and use the nice sharp-edged scraper, is Wrong.

Using these new 3M-type synthetic "steel" wool pads (you know, the ones that look like what you use to scrub pots and pans -- Scotch-Brite, yeah, that's the stuff) is Right.

Letting the pores of the "steel wool" clog up with the gooshy paint so that it just moves the softened paint around on the surface of the car is Wrong.

Spraying the pad with a high-pressure stream of water to get the bits of cruddy paint out of the matrix of the material is Right.

Letting the Jasco get all the way dry before scraping on it, which means you have to get the sharp-edged scraper and end up taking more chunks out of the unsoftened paint etc., is Wrong.

Scraping the Jasco off while still wet, even if it means reapplying new Jasco to that panel later because it didn't sit long enough to soften all the way through the eleven or twelve layers you've applied there before you figured out you had to take off the old paint before you put new paint on, is Right.

Holding the 3M-type pad without solvent-proof rubber gloves, even if you have a hose in the other hand so you can spray water on yourself when you get splashed with Jasco, is Wrong.

Putting on the damn rubber gloves, even if you know you'll only be wearing them for a short time, is Right.

Rubbing too hard is Wrong.

Letting the chemical do the trick and then guiding it as it peels and softens the paint is Right.

Trying to remove all the layers of paint at once is Wrong.

Doing one layer, then coming back and doing another layer, and repeating that until you get to the finish you want is Right.

Getting impatient is Wrong.

Taking your time, even if it means not getting to something today because you have to wait for it to dry overnight, is Right.

Some other observations: If a spot of Jasco gets on your skin while you're doing this, it feels almost exactly like being stung by a yellowjacket (also known as "meat bees"). This has been experimentally proven on a number of occasions, by nearly all members of our family, this summer, as the 1995 World Convocation of Yellowjackets appears to have taken up residence in the foundation of our house, flying in and out through a little hole in the wall in a perennial bad temper. (Though there seems to be a difference in *where* the yellowjacket stings you; it's worst on the face, only moderately painful if it was hiding in the band of your watch when you put it on and stung you up against the wrist, and understandably annoying if it flies up a floppy pair of shorts, creeps up over the top of your underwear, and stings you on the lower abdomen.) Using the Scoville scale (the way that the intensity of chile peppers is measured), Jasco (and therefore yellowjacket stings) have a pain level of approximately 10,000, or roughly comparable to fresh serrano chiles. The popular jalapeno pepper, for reference, rates approximately 2000, and habaneros run from 300,000 to 350,000. I find it very illuminating to consider that I take pleasure in eating things that hurt approximately 30 to 35 times worse than being stung by a yellowjacket. The application of this principle to driving (not to mention restoring) old British sports cars is left as an exercise to the reader. If you are stung by a yellowjacket, put a 5% solution of sodium hypochlorite on it directly, applied by moist compress. (5% sodium hypochlorite may be identified in the grocery under the brand name Clorox...) I have not tried this with Jasco, which is methylene chloride, but which dilutes and is inactivated in tap water (or water from the hose, whichever comes first). For chile peppers, wait six minutes (up to 10-12 for habaneros); the action is neurochemical and nothing other than time can save you.

And finally, once I *do* get the car down to bare metal, I realize it's not quite like Roland's Snake. This Alfa is NOT the aluminium version of the car that uses this bodywork (which is good in a way, because that version, called the GTA, costs many, many times what I paid for this car). So I'll be slapping a coat of primer on it after I get it down to the shiny stuff so that the car doesn't turn orangey-brown all over. Then we'll probably have a whole new set of Right and Wrong pairs, dealing with the proper way to put on primer, and color coats, and doing color sanding, and the rest. I do promise, however, not to post any recipes to this list for live yellowjacket salsa. Talk.bizarre, on the other hand... -

--Scott "First, remove the wings so they won't fly off your tortilla" Fisher