No wheels, no body … no problem

After looking over the frame this morning I quickly came to the realization that we were not going to able sand the frame to the degree necessary. If this frame was going to get sanded, it was going to have to go back to the media-blaster.

Not wanting to take the time to send the frame out and wait for the blaster, I decided to use POR15, a paint over rust product that works well for this application. While POR15 doesn’t leave the frame with a High Performance Finish, it still looks pretty good.

And really, since this car is a driver, there is no need to spend a ton of money on something that will only be seen by the guy on the oil rack.

Return of the Old Timer

After a delay of just over a month, we were finally able to get back to this old timer to move the project along. When we last saw this ’32 Ford, back in late August, we were painting the cab. Now we are finally painting the frame.

The frame wasn’t in dire need of work, just a touch up really. We sanded the frame down to rough up the existing paint, to give the primer something to get its teeth into, then shot over that with a semi-gloss black, just to clean the look up.

It’s not fancy or glamorous work, but these little details when taken together make a difference.

It’s a frame-up

This frame, from a 1965 Chevelle, arrived at the shop yesterday. While we assemble a lot of cars here at JMC AutoworX, sometimes we are just the paint contractor, which is the case for this car. The actual disassembly and reassembly of the car is taking place at another facility.

The frame has already been media-blasted to remove all the rust and crud, but it needs a little touch-up before we apply the paint. While the metal has only a light surface rusting, easily removed, sanding this frame should be … errr … interesting … because of all the little nooks and cranny’s.

After the frame is painted, it will leave and the body of the car will arrive to receive its coat of paint. Reason for splitting the job like this is two fold. First I just don’t have the room to store both the body and the frame when they are separated like this, since this one car would take up the room of two. And secondly, and more importantly, the body is still being repaired and isn’t yet ready for paint.

There is something inherently satisfying in building a car, to watch it leave the shop and know you are the one that brought it to life.  But it is kind of nice sometimes to just paint ’em and send ’em home. Let someone else worry about what went where and lining up all the bolt holes, ya know?