Touchup

Here’s a question for you. How mad would you be if you were to buy a new car and own it less than 4 hours before someone backed into it in a parking lot?  Pretty mad I bet. I know I would be. But that is exactly what happened to the owner of this 2013 Nissan Altima. I took some before pictures but, luckily for the owner, the scratch was so minor it wouldn’t even show up in a picture.

The first picture shows me masking off the bumper, preparing the bumper for paint. The bumper looks so dull because I have already roughed the paint so the new paint will stick.

The second picture shows the bumper after the scratch is touched up and the bumper has been clear coated.

In the third and fourth pictures, Chris and I are putting the bumper back together by installing the grill and the fog lamp covers.

The last two pictures, numbers five and six, are of me putting the bumper back on the car.

I know the owner of the car must have been mad, but after a quick trip through the paint booth, it is, quite literally, good as new.

Seeing red

We spent most of the day yesterday working on big red. The first photo shows Chris and me sanding the hood to remove all the stone chip damage before we repaint it. Normally this would be just a quick sand to rough the paint so the new paint will stick, but since the chips would still be visible as uneven spots after the repaint, the hood need a more thorough sanding.

Picture two shows the hood after we finished sanding it. The mottled look is caused by us sanding places where the paint was chipped all the way to metal so the edges could be feathered smooth.

This truck is so big it has to be painted in pieces. So while the hood was being sanded, the rest of the truck went into the booth. Thursday we painted the replacement right bed side off the truck. Yesterday pulled put the truck in so we could paint the left side. You can see the truck in the booth and partially masked in picture three.

Picture four shows the truck after the plastic mask has been draped over the truck. This plastic has a slight static charge causing it to cling to the truck which makes this a much quicker and easier way to mask off large sections of a vehicle than it would be using paper and tape.

In the fifth photo the plastic mask has been cut away from the area to paint and taped down. In the photo I am cleaning the area to be painted with a cleaner that removes oils and wax from the car to ensure that the paint will stick. The slightly glossy areas are where the truck is still slightly damp with the cleaner.

The bedside has been painted with the base coat in picture six. Base coat is the first stage of the two-stage paint system and provides the color. The finish looks nearly flat in the photo because it is nearly flat. The base coat dries to a flat dull finish and the only reason it has any gloss at all in the picture is because it is still a bit wet.

The last two pictures, numbers seven and eight, shows the transformation in the paint when the second of the two stages, the clear coat, is applied. As you can clearly see (no pun intended) the paint goes from meh to wow! The clear coat not only provides a tough protective barrier for the color, it also provides the zing! that makes automotive finishes so appealing.

It was hard to get good pictures of the truck in the booth because the truck filled the entire booth. There was no room to back up far enough for good shots and certainly no room to back off for pictures of Chase painting. But I think you can still tell that big red is most definitely red. Next week we will paint the hood, the third and last piece of this truck to paint, then we can get it put together and out of here. I’m ready to get it gone too because the truck is so big that it feels like it takes up the whole shop .