Ready for the weekend

First thing this morning we painted the bumper on the Mustang. After giving the paint sufficient time to dry we rolled it out into the shop to clear the booth for another paint project.

This Mustang has a few features blacked out to personalize the car … and in the first photo you can see me re-blacking out one of those features, the embossed Mustang in the bumper.

While I worked on the lettering in the bumper, in the second picture you can see Chris installing the left tail-lamp in the car. The lamp was replaced because it was damaged in the collision.

Tail-lamps installed and bumper lettering blacked out, you can see Chase and I installing the bumper on the car in the last two photos, numbers three and four.

Tomorrow the car goes to clean up then it will be ready to go back to its owner … and since it is supposed to stop raining by tomorrow, it will stay clean for the weekend. A freshly repaired Mustang convertible and a since weekend … not a bad thing for the owner to look forward to.

Two is better than one

Today the new bedside and wheel arch for the Toyota went into the booth for paint. You can see in the first two photos the parts after the application of the base coat.

JMC AutoworX, like most body shops, uses the modern two-stage paint system. The first stage, the base coat, is simply the color. It has little to no gloss and doesn’t age well in the environment. Left unprotected, the base coat would begin to deteriorate in only a few months if exposed to the elements. A good thing if you are building a rat rod but not such a good thing if you want your car finish to have some depth and gloss.

Which is where the second stage comes in. The next two pictures, numbers three and four, show what happens when the second stage, the clear coat, is applied. Notice how the color gains depth and gloss? Not only does the clear coat protect the more delicate base coat underneath, it also provides the zing! to the finish in the form of luster.

Now we just need to let these parts dry so we can handle them. After they dry we can pop the panel back on the truck, put the bumper and shell back on, and this truck will be ready for its next fishing trip.

Up … up … and away

Today the El Camino left the Murphy Rod & Custom shop. It didn’t come here, it went to Alamance Muffler, my preferred exhaust shop, to have the exhaust system installed. The El Camino should be here tomorrow.

Because the tow truck was in the area, since the exhaust shop is just down the road, after dropping the El Camino, the truck stopped by the shop and picked up the Chevelle to take back to Murphy Rod & Custom. While there the Chevelle is going to have a previous substandard repair removed and then redone properly.

In the first photo you can see Chase and the tow truck driver loading the car for transportation. In the second, the car is loaded, secured, and ready to move.

The car will be at Murphy Rod & Custom for a couple of weeks, probably, then come back here for paint.

What a grind

This afternoon, as the day began to wind down, we started some final prep work on the Satellite to prepare it for paint.

The first photo shows Chris in the foreground and Chase in the background, working on areas where the media-blast needs help. Chris is removing paint from the cowl vents. The media-blaster covered this area because while he might have removed the paint, he would have left a 100 pounds of sand in the ventilation system … sand that we would never be able to fully get out.

Chase in the first photo, along with me in the second, are working to chip, beat, grind, or otherwise remove the seam sealer applied to the drip rails. Some shops just paint right over this sealer but we never do. Leaving the old cracked sealer in place under paint just creates a area for the paint to fail.

These are the not so fun jobs that must be done to turn out a quality product … so we just grit our teeth and grind them out.