'76 Camaro - Body Work And Paint - Show-Quality Paint

Working And Filling
With the car in bare metal, the job is to find the distortion, get the metal as close as possible to straight, and then followup with a skim of filler to get it perfect. Here is where an experienced hand and eye can evaluate a panel to find the flaws. Sometimes, feel is all that is necessary, while a long, rigid sanding board can also give a visual indication with the high and low areas appearing light or dark after sanding. If you can feel a flaw, you'd better believe you will see it when the final paint is applied. Step one is the metalwork and there are no shortcuts from the proven methods of the hammer and dolly.

The Cut And Buff
The final color sanding and polishing of the paint is what brings it to full perfection. Alan prefers to have the cut and buff done to the panels while they are still loose, before the car is assembled. A top-quality cut and buff job is a time-consuming process, requiring 60 hours on the g/28. Although there are various power tools used by some shops for the color sanding process, Johnson maintains that to achieve the quality he is after, all the color sanding work is done by hand.

Alan gave us the full low-down on the cut and buff process used to give the g/28 its magnificent final slick finish. "On this car of Johnny's, we started out with 1000 grit sandpaper. On much of the stuff we do, we start out with 800 to get the surface as level as possible. You can get it to where it's slick and looks good, but if it still has that cottage cheese look to it, you're not there. If you want a surface as slick as you can possibly get, you are going to spend as much time if not more cutting and buffing as you did blocking the primer. The Sherwin-Williams clear is very hard and we had to take it to a 2000 grit surface before moving on to the compounds. Usually with a clear like that, you won't get as much shrinkage with the finish down the line."

"We use all 3M products for the buff, and what works best for us is part number 05940 Perfect-It III Extra Cut Compound. We use it with a wool cutting pad; I don't like to use a foam pad for the initial cut. This stuff cuts better than anything out there, but you have to use it sparingly, and build some heat into the process to get it to work. This compound will pull sanding scratches as rough as 1000 grit from a freshly applied clear material. We follow the cutting compound with the 3M 05996 Perfect-It II Foam Polishing Pad Glaze. We use that with a waffl e foam pad, and once you get through going over it with that, anything you do after that point is just putting scratches in it."

Sherwin-Williams When Quality Counts
Sherwin-Williams, and its custom tint arm, Planet Color, supplied all the paint materials for Project g/28. We need to stress that it would've been a complete waste of time for Alan Johnson and his crew to lavish the 700-plus hours of body prep and finish work on Project g/28 if we had only used bargain chemicals and pigments. We wanted only the best quality materials for long-term durability, because we plan on using this baby. Now that we've had our Camaro back for several months and a few thousand miles, it looks like the Sherwin-Williams product didn't disappoint. Here's a breakdown of what we used, in case you want to duplicate any of our colors. To see the actual quantity ordered and the suggested retail price of each, see the sidebar on page 74.