Roughed and ready

Today the Satellite took it’s turn in the paint booth. It has been bead-blasted to remove the paint and sanded to rough up the metal for adhesion.  Now all that is needed is masking and painting. Because of other projects in the shop, yes, I am looking at you El Camino, we didn’t get as early a start on this car as I hoped so all we had time to do today was to mask it off. And we didn’t even finish that.

In the first photo you can see Chris carefully taping around the door. The epoxy primer we will be applying to this car will stick almost anything and we don’t that flying around inside the car. You’d never get that stuff out of there.

The last three pictures, numbers 2-4, show the car mostly masked off. We still have to tape around the front and rear glass, but we just ran out of time to finish it today. We’ll get the rest of the car masked off tomorrow before we prime it.

After we apply the high solids primer and block that down, this car will look better than any police car has a right to.

Just a trim please

We made good progress on the El Camino today. Excepting the interior, which I won’t be doing, the car is very nearly complete.

Today was all about installing the glass and trim. In the first photo you can see the windshield is installed and I am installing the lower molding. In the second photo the remainder of the trim is install and the windshield is complete.

In picture three the rear glass and all it’s trim is installed. I don’t do glass work anymore … and after watching the glass guy work on this car for four hours, I am reminded why I don’t do glass work any more.

In the fourth photo the tail-gate and rear section of the car has it’s moldings installed.

In the fifth and final photo you can see the rest of the bed trim, with the exception of the front piece, is installed. We didn’t have clips for the front piece so we are going to have to track those down before that can be installed. Also in the fifth photo Chris is installing the rear bumper brackets so the bumper can be installed.

We still have the front bed trim piece, along with a few trim pieces on the hood to install, but the bulk of the trim is on the car. And I’m glad it’s done. I have been dreading it for a while now because installing all 427,362 trim clips is time consuming and tedious.

OK, maybe it wasn’t really 427,362 clips … but it sure felt like that many.