As they say, 90% of a paint job is prep, so that was where most of my time was devoted over the two visits it took to get this done. Having completed repairs, it was time to clean everything up and get it down to bare metal as much as possible. As before, I used my DA sander with 80-grit pads, some maroon and tan Scotchbrite pads and a lot of elbow grease.
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| Doors prepped and hanging to test fit on my high-tech hanging rack. You may notice the hinge bolt plates along the top. |
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| Same thing, different perspective. |
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| Inside of the boot lid lip. Some minor surface rust to get out of there still. |
I took a few 2x4's and built a cheesy hanging rack and used some heavy wire coat hangers that I found at Walmart to make hangers for everything, as well as eye bolts to screw into the wood. Worked just fine, though I couldn't fit everything on the rack at the same time.
The areas inside of the doors at the window slot and the bottom and the inside of the boot lower lip (where the Triumph lettering is) had a good coating of surface rust that I had to clean. My concern was that I would be unable to get paint in there using the spray gun due to the interference from other pieces of metal (especially the doors) or the tight angles. Instead, like with the spots of the underneath and interior that I couldn't get, after cleaning it all again with Wax & Grease Remover, I used a chip brush to give two coats of epoxy to these areas.
Once the brush stuff was done, it was one to one final cleaning with W&G Remover and shooting. I hung the boot lid and frame on the wooden rack and shot those first, then transferred them to some sawhorses to dry so that I could hang the doors for their turn.
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| Boot lid. You can see the brush marks on the lower right. It's much more obvious in person. |
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| The boot lid frame. |
The paint brush marks on the boot lid are pretty bad. But, this is on the inside and you'd have to crank your head down and around to ever see them with the boot lid open. Think I'll suffer that imperfection.
Next up was the doors with two wet coats.
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| Driver's side. You can just see the factory red on the left. I tried to get paint in there, too. Glad I used the brush. |
I got everything covered but, overall, the job was not as good as with the underneath. I think there are two main reasons. First, I'm not sure that I got everything as clean as I should have. Second, I didn't have the gun set up quite right and I was laying the primer down pretty heavily. Another reason is that I know my form still sucks, but I knew that would be the case going in so I'm cool with that.
Given these issues, I got some pretty good fisheyes in the primer.
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| A bit blurry, but you can see the dimples. |
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| A better shot, closer up. |
As I've mentioned before, Barry, the owner of Southern Polyurethanes is very customer-centric. He gives out his personal cell phone number for tech support. I jumped on their forum this morning and asked about what to do. In short, I don't really need to worry too much. Clean it up again real well before I spray anything over it, but I don't have to block it out or strip it and try again (which I was afraid I would have to do). In this case, Barry said the primer was doing what is was supposed to do, but the epoxy thickness is important, so not to sand it. Getting three coats of my blocking primer would take care of it in the long run. So, I'm happy with that answer...and he does make the stuff, so, I kinda trust him!
All in all not a bad few days. I say at the end of the video that I would get over there "tomorrow", which is right now, but I was getting a bit burned out and decided to skip it. It'll be a few days until I get back over there so that will give me time to figure out what's up next. I did stop over there on my way home from work and the fisheyes flowed out a bit, so they are not as bad as the pictures show, but there is still a problem there to correct.
Oh, and if you ever think you don't need particulate filters over the organic vapor ones (you'd probably literally die if you tried to paint without those; the fumes are really bad without them), here is a pic of mine after painting what I've done up to before doing this stuff.
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| Yuck! You can see how white they used to be around the edges. |
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