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

Primer, Guidecoat And Sanding
The panels are racked in a way to give easy access for spraying. One thing Alan does not compromise is having the parts perfectly clean, even at the first primer stage. As Alan explains: "Everything gets blown off with compressed air and wiped down by hand in the booth. The parts have already been cleaned with a surface cleaner by that point. The first thing we apply is the Sherwin-Williams PE 990 etching primer on the bare metal, which has an acid component made to bite to the bare metal. Once the etch primer has been given the recommended flash time, it is followed by the Sherwin-Williams P30A Spectra Prime filling primer. I give it two to three coats of filler primer, depending upon the surface. I like to use as little primer as possible."

Similarly, the main body tub is prepared for primer. Alan continues: "It's the same process again. The outside of the car is clean and we've cleaned the inside of the car as well as possible. Just to keep from having any loose debris flying around, it helps to tape up the inside of the car. There are a lot of areas in there that can contain a little bit of debris. If you get trash in the primer, you're putting contaminants in it." The main body tub receives the exact same treatment as the individual body panels, starting with the Sherwin- Williams etch primer, followed by two or three coats of the urethane fill primer.

A guidecoat is a very light, contrasting color shot over the primer for the purpose of identifying flaws later when the primer is block-sanded smooth. Alan has unique requirements for doing the guidecoat his way: "A lot of articles I see just have a guy using a rattle can to put a guidecoat on, and that just doesn't work well. It doesn't give you a really thin surface coat on everything that it covers. It's too heavy; it won't go into small pin holes or fine scratches. We use a black lacquer primer that has been really thinned down and that works best for us."

Once the primer is cured, the block-sanding begins. Time spent here leads to those perfectly straight body panels in the final finish. Alan details the blocking procedure used: "I use 3M paper, starting out with 180, getting it level with just a little bit of guidecoat showing here or there, and then coming back with 400 dry and then 600 wet as the final sand. Any spots that don't clean up at this stage will get a little bit of polyester glazing filler. If it's something really small that we can finish-sand real nicely-that the sealer will take care of-I may not re-prime those areas. If it's anything major, we'll go back and spot-prime those areas. You try to eliminate all that in the beginning, but there is always going to be something that shows up. The majority of the time, the primer is done in one hit."

"I prefer to final-finish everything with a paint paddle. I can't tell why, but no matter what the surface shape is, be it a round fender on a '30s car or the flat panels on the newer stuff, I can get a better finish with a paint paddle. On this car, it was guidecoated once, hit with the 180, any bad areas taken care of, re-primed as necessary, then guidecoated again and blocked with the 400. It was then final-sanded with the 600 wet. On this car the final 600-sanding was done wet, but that just depends on which guy is doing the work: one guy prefers wet, and one guy prefers dry sanding."

Shooting The Finish
Any painter will tell you that the result of the effort is only as good as the prep, and Alan is no exception. "Most people don't realize what goes into a paint job. The actual painting of it is the easy part. A good painter is going to spend two to six hours doing an all-over paint job once everything is ready and he is in there spraying. On a car like this, when you are doing exterior body panels, the actual spray time is nothing-it's all the work before and after that goes into it." The painting process on the g/28 consisted of three parts, starting with the application of the P30 urethane primer sealer, followed by the Ultra 7000 Garnet Red basecoat (an early- '80s AMC Jeep color), followed by the CC950 Ultra 8000 clearcoat, all from Sherwin-Williams.

As with the primer stage, the panels were racked in the booth to be painted separately, but this time, hung in a way that gives full access for spraying front and back where color coverage is required. The sealer-coat provides a consistent base for the subsequent layers of paint to be built on, and actually lays in and fills minor texture flaws. The sealer-coat provides a semi-glossy surface, allowing a final critical look at the panels before the color goes on.

After the sealer-coat, the base is shot to provide the color. Base is comparatively fast drying, and contains all the color in a basecoat/clearcoat paint system, but it has little reflectivity or resistance to the elements. That is taken care of by the clear. Before the base is shot, the individual containers of color are bulked together and repoured into the paint cans: a move made to ensure exact color consistency from can to can. This is essential for a perfect color match when shooting multiple panels separately. Once again, Alan emphasizes how important it is to have everything perfectly clean for the final finish. "You can paint in a two-car garage and if everything is clean, you are going to get just as nice of a paint job as you are going to get in a $150,000 paint booth."

Shooting technique comes down largely to individual preference. Alan tells us: "When you are seven or eight inches from the panel, you have a contact pattern that is about eight or nine inches and you use an overlap of about 30 percent. Again, it comes down to painter preference; the base is pretty forgiving. The main thing is to get the base to lay down with minimum texture, since texture in the base will show up under the clear and much of it comes down to the quality of the material." Three coats of base are applied to each piece, and the base application finishes with a fog-coat. Alan tells us: "On this color, on this car, because we were painting everything off the car and the paint is a light metallic, once we had coverage on everything, we will come back and do a fog-coat over every panel. Over-reduce the base just a little bit, crank the air pressure up, double or triple the gun distance, and about double the speed, and you are going to get a perfect color match on every panel."

The final step to the shooting process is applying the clearcoat. The car is once again given a light wipe-down with a tack rag to remove any overspray or dust from the basecoat application. Alan has a specific sequence for applying the clear: "Anything on the jambs or the inside is done first, the exterior surface is done next, then we skip the interior surface on the second exterior coat, and then we come back to the inside and finish with the third coat on the exterior. We put three coats on the outside, on everything that's getting sanded and buffed, and two coats on everything else. Again, like the base, the actual shooting technique depends on the painter's preference, and it depends on how the clear is laying down. You have to look and see what you need to do. If you are spraying something and it is not flowing like you want it to, you have to make a change in your technique."

Equipment and materials also play a big part in the results obtained in the booth. Alan says: "Some of the faster-drying production clears used in collision shops will not flow at all once it hits the surface of the car. We try to use the slowest reducers and activators possible. We don't want it to dry and cure as fast as it possibly can, because you are going to get more shrinkage and a more brittle surface doing that. The less reducer you can use and still let the material flow and atomize coming out of the gun, the better finish you are going to get. With a lot of these new paint guns you can get now, like the new SATA we use for urethane clear, you can get by with less and less reducer. It will come out and lay down like glass." That's what it is all about.