Get’n Buffed – My Falcon Wagon Gets a Shine-on

Ford Falcon Wagon – Get’n Buffed

Crushed. Stopped dead and pissed. That’s how I’d describe myself following my first paint attempt on my 1963 Falcon Wagon.

The After shot of the inner quarter panel.

How should I feel? The bodywork sucked, there were foo-boos all over the place from a careless painter who’s been cheating everyone he meets since. But… that angry tone and deflated project is  almost completely back on track now! My wagon’s got a new coat of flat gold paint and the interior paint’s almost completely fixed thanks to my buddies at Infinite Detail.

I first met Jeff from Infinite cause he joined MyRideisMe.com and uploaded some pictures of his 1960 Falcon Wagon. I contact him and cried on his should some about the sorry state of my Falcon’s paint. He showed me his website and the “before and after” pictures and said, “Let me take a look.”

Soon after, Jeff and his brother-in-law Mike were over. They took a long look, then explained in great detail what they could and couldn’t do and offered a written quote. That kind of honesty and clarity about what they couldn’t do is the only reason I’m not completely done with the interior. Hey, they’re not magicians! One panel was so far gone, they just couldn’t bring it back.

These are the “Before”, nut wrenching shots of the runs. Here’s what a non-pro delivers (Click to see full size… and cry)

My goal for the paint was to repair, if possible the mile-long runs left in the inside quarter panels… on both sides. After that, all was gravy, but I wanted to see what the boys could do. In the pictures below, I tell the story about what they did and how they did it. No doubt – these guys are professionals and take as much time and care as any craftsmen I’ve ever seen. They freak’n resurrected my interior!

 

Let the guys from Infinite Detail take a look at your ride! If they can make crap paint look this good, imagine what they can do with good paint! It sure was a pleasure, and a relief, to work with Jeff and Mike. I can’t recommend their service any higher!

Falcon Wagon Paint – This Time with Flat Clear

Flat Paint Job for my Ford Falcon Wagon

Finally. I don’t think I could have taken a longer path to get there, but at least it’s done. My Falcon’s wearing new paint and the flat sheen or “hot rod flat” I was going for came out great. Special thanks to T.C. at FinishMaster in Mesa, AZ for help with the paint and advice to make this happen. I also took advantage of advice from Kevin Tetz from “Trucks” TV show. Kevin helped me with 11 Tips for a Flat Paint Job and sorta held my hand on this project.

It’s a long story how I got here, you can read it all at this link: Falcon Wagon Build. It started with bodywork lessons and primer from Squeeg’s Kustoms then a paint job gone wrong. Back on track, here’s how my buddy Joel and I laid on this flat gold paint. I think it came out great!

Before Paint Prep:

You can see here what my wagon looked like right before we started on Saturday morning. Over Labor Day, my sons and I scuffed the clearcoat with 400 grit and/or scotch-brite so the new paint would stick and Joel did a little dent repair on the lower part of the fender. See it? You might also note that the fenders are a different color than the rest of the car. That’s why I’m repainting it! With this color, it’s next to impossible to match it.

Next came the tedious job or masking the car. Joel crawled up and over the partly-masked tailgate and taped up all the door seams. The interior paint, so far, is salvageable, and we’re not painting around the windows and in the engine compartment. The window area will be covered by trim and the engine compartment may end up black or we’ll leave it. Turns out the new paint matches the original better than the fender repaint did!

Here’s the final shot of the car before paint. Note the garage prep work. I didn’t cover the floor, but we wet it down between coats. Almost every wall was completely covered in visqueen and we had to crawl on the floor to get in the house for drinks and fresh air. I had a big fan with a too-ugly-to-photograph cardboard setup that held two filters for the incoming air. I had positive air pressure, or put another way, more air coming in than exhausting out through the two floor fans just out of sight. Let’s paint!

Basecoat, Basecoat Pearl then Flat Clear:

This is the primer sealer coat. This is also where we discovered that the SATA paint gun we were using wasn’t working right. If you read the Flat Paint Job tips one of the first thing Kevin Tetz said was to do a “sprayout” to test the paint and the process. Well, we didn’t. We flat ran out of time on Saturday so now it was Sunday and we both had to work Monday. We just went for it!

If we had tested the gun, we would have found air bubbles blowing up into the paint cup. Joel knew this was wrong, so a quick search on Google told us SATA guns need the paint nozzle to be very tight. Since we’d borrowed the gun, he was afraid to crank down on the nozzle, but then did. Problem solved, but not before blowing some pimer-boogers out onto the car. The air bubbles in the cup caused the paint to cure way too quickly. It was like mud cleaning the paint gun. OOPS!

Finally…. Color!

Not sure if this is the first or third coat of paint. (fumes were heavy that day my friends!) One thing I am sure of… I picked a killer color! After staring at the color book for way too long (like I do at a candy vending machine) I finally picked this color as the store was closing. I had a picture of champagne in a glass I was referencing and before the pearl, champagne is about the color seen here.

The three color basecoats were laid out in long lines: (picture Joel fast walking down the side of the car) first on the roof, then one side, then the hood, the other side, then the back. the first coat looked sorta splotchy, but Joel warned me about that. With the next coats, she laid down sweet and looked great in my newly installed lights.

Pearl: The Second Basecoat

(click to see these pictures full size)

Next was the pearl coat. I’ll have to hit up T.C. from FinishMaster for the exact specs on the gold pearl.  Got it! The pearl I used was the 1021s sunbeam gold pearl.

The pearl and the flat clear were the only two things I changed from the original paint job. The color and materials were all the same.

I learned though, that a pearl coat isn’t always in the clearcoat. I knew a pearl paint job was a “tri-coat” paint job, but I always thought it was two steps of clearcoat, one with pearl and the last without so the pearl “floats” above the paint. I’m sure that’s how it was done originally (to save money), but we followed FinishMaster’s advice and used a Chroma Color basemaker with a trick, Japanese made pearl T.C. was stoked on. It looked… creamy… in the can, but in the sun, it sparkled. You can see in the pictures above that the shine has changed. It’s hard to describe though… it went from a shine to a glow that became more subdued and slick when we laid down the flat clear.

We planned to lay down the pearl in two or three coats, depending on how it looked. (Again, another great endorsement for the test sprayouts) Turns out, we didn’t have to choose. We had just enough pearl to put two coats all over the car and a third on the roof, hood and all the curved parts of the car. (it gave my garage floor a nice sparkle too)

Flat Clear – How Flat is Flat Enough?

I’m skipping a few pictures here down to the finished, unmasked car. I could show what the car looked like after one, two or three coats of flattened clear, but you couldn’t tell the difference. I will explain what we used and how we mixed it:

The clear was Nason brand (DuPont’s economy brand) 465-00 High Image Urethane HS Clearcoat mixed with DuPont Plas-Stick 2360S Flexible Matting Additive. Those two were mixed with activator and reducer to make the finished, sprayable flat clear. The tech sheet had mixing instructions for three levels of flatness: Flat (0-5% gloss); Eggshell (20-30% gloss) and Semi-Gloss (50-60% gloss).

The first coat of flat clear was mixed up, by weight on my wife’s digital bread making scale (haha!), for eggshell. Eggshell was the plan all along… not totally flat, but somewhere right in the middle. Course that changed!

With the first coat of flattened clear down, we kicked back and watched it cure for about 30 minutes. The clearcaot had a different stink to it than the paint and made the floor sticky… and didn’t get “dry” to the touch as fast as everything else did. After waiting, we could tell the eggshell flatness was too shiny. The way we reasoned, it’d be better to have it too flat then almost shiny. “Almost glossy” would be like we tried to get shiny paint but failed.

Fearing the 0-5% flat clear would be too flat, I fell back on too much math in college and found middle ground between flat and eggshell.  Eggshell was 24% clearcoat and the “flat” was only 14.5% clearcoat. I mixed up a custom batch at 18% clearcoat with the matte clear (the matting additive), reducer and activator mixed at the same proportional ratio as they were: 20% reducer and 20% activator meant the matte clear was now 42% of the mix. 18+20+20+42 = 100% (ya with me?)

The final result is what you see here when I pushed her out into the morning sun for the first time:

I love it! You can tell we went for a hot rod flat look and the gold pearl just GLOWS in the low sun. I’ll push it out into the setting sunlight next to see how the golden light reflects off the gold pearl.

You like the flat paint? Let me know what you think.

Thanks again to my buddies at FinishMaster!

 

How To Metal Flake Your Ride

How To Metal Flake Your Car

Just because I love grease, doesn’t mean that I don’t love sparkly things too! Before going to Viva Las Vegas this year, I wanted to add a little bling to my 1955 Studebaker Champion with a metal flake paint job.

Studie and I have been through a lot together in the five years I’ve owned and drove her. I’ve become attuned to her original patina’d coral and white paint job. So originally the thought of changing her exterior in any way made me nervous. But the more I thought about adding a subtle sparkle to Studie’s white roof portion, the more I liked the idea.

Not knowing the first thing about how to paint, I was lucky to have an expert nearby. Pati Fairchild is the newest member of my car club, the Gasoline Girls. She also happens to be a professional paint and body chick who teaches the subject at El Camino College.

After polling friends on Facebook and looking through various paint samples, I paid a visit to Coast Airbrush in Anaheim for my final selection. I went in knowing I wanted an abalone sort of flake that would disappear in the shade but be super sparkly in the sun. The friendly guy at Coast Airbrush highly recommended the House of Kolor Ice Pearl Flake.

I’d had a little experience with Ice Pearl before. Co-Gasoline Girl Lori’s F1 is covered in ice pearl over bare metal – and it’s a crowd stopper at every car show we attend (as you can tell in the picture above!) After being blinded by the sparkling white ice pearl in the sunshine, it didn’t take me long to decide it was the way to go.

With Red and White House of Kolor Ice Pearls Flake in hand, I gathered up my fellow Gasoline Girls. We were all hands on the job as Pati walked us through the steps to give Studie a professional metal flake paint job! They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so follow along and learn the process in the great video below! (Thanks to Lori for the video skills!)

We ended up doing three coats of White and Red House of Kolor Ice Pearl flake mixed into clear, covering that in two coats of plain clear – for a total of five coats. Pati showed me how to spray as she did the first coat and then I grabbed the gravity feed gun for the last four.

Gun in hand for the first time, I was a little nervous about how to paint. Keeping in mind that Pati told me to spray even and steady, I quickly found a rhythm. The ladies said I looked like a pro. I’ve gotta say I’m looking forward to my next chance to paint!

The Ice Pearl Paint sure does sparkle when the sun hits it right! Although ultimately I might want a heavier metal flake, I think the ice pearl flake was a great decision. It kept my patina’d roof looking just like it always has…but when the sun hits it, watch out!

I’ve still got a ways to go before giving Stude the real body attention she needs. But until then, she’s got a little sparkle inside and out…just like me!

Happy Trails,

Grease Girl

Many thanks to Pati Fairchild, El Camino College, and the Gasoline Girls!

If you know of any young ladies interested in car careers, check out El Camino College’s Women in Technology Program!

Falcon Wagon Paint – Gold on the Long Roof

My Ford Falcon Wagon’s Finally Got Paint

It’s been a long journey. I’m rebuilding/restoring/modifying (choose what you like) my 1963 Falcon Wagon. I’m way over due on what’s been done, but here’s where it is now:Shown with premium primer from Squeeg’s Kustoms (Squeeg’s is a TOP QUALITY paint shop, not to be confused with the painter mentioned later)

OK, fine, the car’s been sitting around way too much waiting for me to get off my butt. I’m kinda off now, but not completely. Thanks to buddies here in town helping me “get off the computer!” and back into the garage… there’s been some progress.

So I have one question: Do you like GOLD?

It looks great in the sun here, but I would NOT recommend this painter. Terrific Paint and Customs, a Phoenix, AZ custom painter and body shop.

The great thing about MY Ride is Me is that I don’t really care all that much if you like it.

I’ve been working with a Phoenix, AZ painter that specializes in affordable paint. The idea was to get a good paint job, not super-show quality but at an affordable price. It didn’t work out.

The painter is Terrific Paint and Customs at 1846 E. Madison in Phoenix, AZ. His name is Mark Behlke. I repeat, I would NOT recommend this painter. I will be writing a follow-up story soon on how this has been an awful experience and a waste of time and money for very poor quality work.

Here’s the work that Terrific Paint and Customs (Keyword: Phoenix custom paint shop) did that was fairly good:

In addition to some rust repair int he roof that we didn’t originally see, Mark also mounted a custom pop-up gas filler, mounted the Optima Battery on it’s side in the engine compartment (that’ll be another story) and shaved the drip rails. You can just barely tell in this picture. That’s alot of drip rail on a Ford Falcon wagon!

Finally, he replaced the cowl vent with one from a doner car after the HACK-job the previous owner did filling in the vent.

The gold stripes you see on the roof start on the hood and fade to nothing at the back of the roof. Here’s the hood:

In the light, the non-custom gold paint with gold pearl top-coat glows like crazy!  Right now, with no other colors on the outside, it’s TOO gold!  With the black steel wheels with spider caps with pinner-white wheels will start to set it off. Add a little black, fine line pinstriping and we’re in business!

OK, so there’s the update I’m way, WAY behind doing… want to see where it started? Check the Ford Falcon Wagon Overhaul’n-like tear down or just follow the whole Falcon Wagon Build here.

That’s it for now. I want to load up the story of how I added bearings to the clutch and brake pedal next. It worked out great, was easy and cheap. Win, win and win…

If you run into Mark from Terrific Paint and Customs in Phoenix, AZ, please tell him you saw this story, and whatever kind of paint you want, I’d find someone else.

The Wifes Mild Custom ’65 Crown Imperial

Custom Car 1965 Crown Imperial Sedan

What does a hot rod shop owner’s wife drive?  It’s gotta have some purple and lace right?  Even some fur… Even though its a ladies ride, I think you dudes out there will dig as well.

This is Julie’s 1965 Crown Imperial custom.  Julie is married to Scotty Birdsall, owner of Chuckles Garage.  If you missed the story on his ride, click this link, ’62 Ford Falcon Straight Axle Gasser.

This 1965 Crown Imperial (alot of folks call it a Chrysler, but Crown was its own entity at the time) is definitely My Ride is Me.  Let’s see why…

You can see it certainly fits in as a “Mild Custom” build.  There’s not alot of mods other than a super crazy paint job, some suspension work, a groovy fur dash (it is a lady’s ride remember!) and some 600-15 wide whitewalls.  When the goal is to personalize your classic machine, those are simple and effective touches.

Here’s the face of a not-often seen 60′s classic luxury sedan.  I can’t say I’ve seen one of these before, but I like the mid 60′s era Detroit designs.  To me this car is the perfect mix between late 50′s flair and 60′s edginess.  Look at the front bumper.  It has just a hint of the late 50′s big bumpers, but its definitely been toned down.  Stick with rockin’ round headlights, but now they’re encased in a square housing.  The rear fenders also have a miniature fin sticking out of the middle of it.

The Paint is a black base with candy burple and blue candy over the top with 3 sizes of flake. The lace is another shade of candy blue with gallons upon gallons of clear dumped over the car.  The sides are black with tiny bits of blue flake thrown in for effect. The paint looks like you could actually swim in it.

Look at that lace work.  I’ve seen about half a dozen lace paint jobs in person and every time I just stare at ‘em.  I wonder how the heck they do that.  Work of art!

Scotty says about the power setup, “It’s powered by a 413 and an auto tranny getting about 7 mpg…Take that you hippie dippie Prius owners!”

That’s awesome Scotty and Julie.  Love the Crown.  This is what I love about this hobby called hot rodding.  We each have our own likes and dislikes, we all have different budgets (or lack thereof), there’s so many different makes and models to choose from.  Even if the mods are simple, if you’re able to achieve a finished car that is unique to you and your style and puts a smile on your face, then you have successfully hot rodded your car.

Chuckles Garage Blog

Hechtspeed

Next Page »