I'm not sure I can hang the hood from overhead, the ceiling is drywalled and I can't get at the rafters, I'll give that some thought. The hood doesn't really line up so good at the sides, note the blue arrows in the pictures below:



The driver's side is better aligned on the side than the passenger side.



I guess before I try anything on the hood I'll try to get it aligned better, lower it in the rear and raise it a bit at the front and then see what I have then.

Is this what you're referring to as the lower valance?:



I'm not sure about ignoring your previous post, I thought the turnbuckle idea sounded pretty good!

 

I've currently got the rear of the car sanded with 120 grit. Hubby talked to the painter last night, and he said there is some chance that if I spray primer now, over time the primer could shrink back and show the 120 grit sand scratches so he said it would be a good idea to go over it with 180 grit before I prime just to make sure. I'm feeling pretty stressed out about getting the primer on before I'm out of dry windless days at 70 F and winter sets in. I've got things to do today, but hopefully I can get back at it tomorrow and have the 180 grit pass done pretty soon.

 

i used the turnbuckle to push my hood surround up. yours needs to come down. come to think of it, you could also use it to pull down as long as you get a good grip on the headlight header bar to pull it down. here is a header bar replacement and headlight rebuild vid. about 2;30 to about 5 minute mark gives you a good loo at the header bar with horns, relays and stuff all on there. i put a bracket on with the relay closest to center. the side gap halfway back needs a hunk of foam under the hood in the channel. they make bumpers for that. you can experiment with almost anything soft. even rolled up paper towel or similar. stud in ceiling. stud finder. eyebolt. not a ton of weight. you could almost hang it from the dryeall without finding the stud. but don't.
my car is 1100 miles away so i can't get you pics yet of mine.

 

That's quite the video! I certainly wouldn't want to hold a camera and one-hand all those procedures.

 

You may have noticed a lot of my pictures are on the dark side. Some time back I couldn't get my camera to flash when taking a picture and eventually got it to work in a mode where it takes two pictures when you press the shutter, one with flash and one without. For whatever reason the pictures with the flash are almost always much fuzzier than the ones taken without it and so I usually post the darker pictures.

Saturday I got up an hour and a half early and hoped to primer the car that day. As I was wiping it down with degreaser I noticed this chip on the roof:




I really wanted to get the car primed so I thought about leaving it but decided to fix it instead as brown paint had been applied and new paint wouldn't stick to it unless I sanded out the brown paint in the chip:








After I got the filler applied to the chip I thought that's going to be slow going sanding by hand, dare I try an air sander on it to get rid of the majority of excess filler? If I go too far with the air sander I'll have to reapply filler and it'll take longer than if I had just done the whole thing by hand. What the hell, I decided to give it a go with the 3" air sander you can see in the picture below:




After that I went back to hand sanding and got a nice repair done. Getting an edge on a corner like often takes me a few rounds of filling and sanding as the filler doesn't like to stack up on an edge. It took me about an hour and 1/2 to fix that chip and by that time I did I was getting short on time that day to get the car masked off and primed and it was overcast anyway with a 30% chance of rain so I decided to try again the next day.



On Sunday I cleaned off dust that had accumulated on the car and wiped the rear end down with a degreaser/cleaner and backed the car out of the garage.

Ward said I had to prime the car outside as the paint vapours sometimes can be exploded by a spark from when the compressor comes on. I've never sprayed a car outside before and it was much more troublesome than I was expecting. I don't know about where you live but in Saskatchewan we maybe get a completely calm day once or twice a year, you almost never see fog here because it's normally windy. Sunday was a pretty calm day for Saskatchewan, wind speed varied during the time I was working from between 4 mph to 18 mph.

The fairly mild wind still blew around the paint from my Low Volume High Pressure spray gun and made it hard to get an even wet coat (I bought the LVHP gun instead of the HVLP one because it was $30 instead of $85) . I had a lot of places with dry spray the texture of fine sandpaper. Making it more difficult, the driver's side quarter panel and the tail light panel were in the shade and with my pupils narrowed from the bright sun I couldn't really see if I was getting an even wet coat there. I'd say the lack of good light on some parts of the car was the biggest problem I faced spraying outdoors (and indoors too, for that matter). To me that's the biggest advantage of a professional spray booth, the even lighting all around the car. If the paint I was using didn't have Iso-cyanates in it I might ask my husband to follow me around with a halogen light as I spray the car next time. I wore a respirator with an organic filter on it.

We bought a gallon of primer as the painter said that would be enough to prime the whole car. Well, not if you're spraying outside. Then most of your paint is lost in the wind and I used the entire gallon to spray about 1/3 of the car. I did lose one paint cup full when it fell off the spray gun and spilled all over the garage floor. I cleaned that up and when I went to put the cup back on the spray gun it wouldn't fit. I saw the open end of the cup was now oval instead of round. I tried to bend it back with my bare hands but didn't have enough strength to do it so out came the body hammer and with that and using the bed of the hoist as a dolly I got the cup opening round enough again to re-attach it to the spray gun.






After spraying the primer I was surprised and disappointed when I saw imperfections in the body work show up so clearly. Between the tail lights and above the Corvette letters was particularly cringe worthy, no where near the even surface I thought I had. Near the top of the driver's side quarter panel was pretty uneven too. The blue line in the picture below shows where there was a ridge in the body work and the green line shows where the bodywork was just uneven:




I've removed the lines from the above picture and the ridge and uneveness can be seen in the picture below:





Other than those two areas I couldn't see any problems with the body work, the passenger side quarter panel looked fine (although maybe that was just because there were no shadows on it to show flaws) and other than the previously mentioned problems the driver's side quarter panel looked fine too. The upper rear deck I was pretty pleased with as well as I had struggled so much with it. There was about a 6" diameter barely perceptible bulge in one area that shouldn't have been there but it was so minor I figured it would even be acceptable as is.

In the picture below you may be able to see a horizontal ridge on the ducktail just to the right of centre and the uneveness to the left of centre. This is the area where the two halves of the mold for the ACI rear clip joined and it was pretty uneven. I thought I had it pretty nice but it looks pretty gruesome now that the uniform colour of the primer is on it. I sure hope I can improve significantly on that area.



I really want to start sanding down the areas that didn't come out so well but I'm not going to touch it until I have the rest of the car in primer as I'm sure to go through even the thickest of the primer in some areas and I don't want to have to spot prime the car again before next spring at the earliest and who really knows how long it's going to be before I get the front end primed.

I put 3 coats on the car and hadn't gotten anywhere near as much primer on the rear deck as I felt was desirable. For the fourth coat I decided to concentrate on the upper deck before I ran out of primer. I had been spraying first on the driver's side and then moving around the rear of the car to the passenger side. I realized after three coats this had me spraying into the wind on the upper deck and was really limiting how much paint I was getting on it. For the last coat I decided to switch it up and start with the passenger side so I'd be spraying the upper deck with the wind instead. Then I finally got a good even wet coat on the entire upper deck.








After the first coat of primer didn't go on as thick as I wanted I decided to lower the air pressure from 50 psi to 40 psi in the hopes of getting a thicker spray the wind couldn't blow away so easily. Unfortunately this resulted in the spray gun spitting out big drops of primer on to the car. I quickly stepped the air pressure back up to 50 psi to fix that problem. You can see some of the big drops of paint that hit the driver's side quarter panel in the picture below:




Trying to spray enough primer on the car to get a wet coat was pretty challenging and In a number of places I got way too much primer on the car which unfortunately will add a lot of unnecessary hours to the sanding. You can see the ripples of excess primer (and a lot of dirt) in the picture below:




The worst "boo-boo" was on the tail light panel. As this area was in shadow I was having a very hard time seeing if I was getting enough on to get a wet coat and I really over did it on the centre right of the tail light panel:



Yikes, eh? That's going to take a lot of clean up, lol!

The centre left of the tail light panel came out much better:




When I primed cars indoors I never got a single run or ripple from too much paint and it was easy to get a good even wet coat so this was pretty frustrating.

In the picture below you can see where I managed to hit the passenger side quarter panel with the spray gun - I can't believe I did that!




And in the following two pictures you can see more ripples/runs where I got the paint on too thick again. When you're spraying out side with any wind at all there's a very fine line between getting enough paint on to get a wet coat and getting too much on:



Below picture the run is on the lip of the wheel opening:




All in all, the passenger side quarter panel came out pretty well:




Another unexpected draw back to painting outside is the amazing amount of dirt that falls on the car while you're painting. After carefully wiping the car down and wetting down the gravel back alley before starting it was very annoying to see all the crap that fell on the upper deck between coats. You can see it in the picture below as well as splatter from the gun when I set the air pressure down to 40 psi:



In thinking about it now, I'm lucky that at this time of the year leaves weren't already falling off the trees and landing on the wet (not for long) primer.

The two following pictures were taken consecutively with flash and without:






In the picture without flash immediately above you can see a lot of the uneveness on the tail light panel above the Corvette letters. I sure hope I can improve considerably on that, but I'm not sure exactly how to sand it right.

All in all I suppose it was an acceptable job, all the problems can be sanded out when I get to it. If you can at all avoid it I don't recommend spraying paint outdoors. The forecast for several upcoming days was temperatures of around 70 F and I suppose I could have waited for more days looking for better painting conditions but I think it's unlikely I would do any better than the day I chose. And if I had waited longer maybe the leaves would be falling off the trees by then. I probably picked the best possible day for outdoor painting.

I'll be looking for an alternative to spraying outside after this but I suppose if I end up priming the rest of the car outside and using 3 times as much primer as normal I've figured it out enough I can improve a lot on what I did this time. It might be cheaper to tow the car to a paint shop and pay them to primer it.

This was another major milestone in my project and I'm relieved to have gotten it done before it got too cold to do it this year

 

Looks good. I wonder if the unevenness in the taillight panel is just due to the way the primer laid down. The last photo almost looks like the primer along the top edge of the taillight panel is more dry than around where the letters go, so maybe it's just reflecting the light a little different.

 

standard primer? mot feather fill of r another polyester primer? use 220 or 320 on a random orbital after it is good and dry. then spot it back in with the gun or spray bombs.

 

With some of the rear that's true but the primer laid down fairly evenly on the tail light panel. It's more prominent in person.

I'm not sure what a "standard primer" is. It's a high build primer with a 1 part hardener to 4 parts primer and I know it has iso-cyanates in it. I don't know anything else about it. Next time I'l out to the garage I'll get the empty can and get you some more information on it.

 

The primer was Pro Form direct to metal high build urethane 2k Primer.

 

standard primer is primer thinned with lacquer thinner. your urethane primer sponds like a sandable sealer. you have more for touching up the sand-throughs? you can still machine sand the runs, lifted parts and sags so you aren't standing there wearing your hand off until christmas...

 

I think you’ve done an amazing job, keep up the good work.

rgwoehr just did am amazing job repainting his car and many of the issues he ran into seem to be mirrored in your thread.
There were several tips about how to deal with the runs and other issues you both seem to have in common.
Its a great thread!

As far as the fuzzy pictures you are getting with your camera and flash, I tend to have the same issues with mine.
The problem is that with the auto flash on, the camera automatically slows the shutter on the lens to allow more light into it.
The slightest movement of the camera will make the photos blurry.
You can purchase a small tripod, that will fit in your hand small, that are really cheap, and will screw onto your camera which are really handy.
You can also hear the camera shutter open and close and if you hold the camera still until the shutter stops moving, it will improve the sharpness of the photos.
My phone does the same thing, but it seems quicker and I tend to get better pictures with my phone.

 

I'd be thrilled if it only took me til christmas to sand away the excess primer, lol

I don't have any primer left to touch up sand throughs, I used the whole gallon on the rear. While the runs and ripples are screaming to me "Sand me down! Fix me!" I'm going to leave the rear as is until I'm ready to prime the front of the car and then I can do touchups on the rear of the car while I prime the front. I'm not looking forward to removing and replacing the doors several times, they're so heavy and it's such a struggle for two people to do.

I recently started following rgwoehr's thread, it's been very helpful.

I do my best to hold my camera still until the shutter clicks and it flashes but I'm just not as steady as I used to be.

 

[QUOTE=Priya;1605701236
I do my best to hold my camera still until the shutter clicks and it flashes but I'm just not as steady as I used to be.[/QUOTE]
Join the club

 

i thought whole car was primered. and you will have more then. and the longer paint cures, the better it sands. is it before you are snowed-in, or in the spring? funny, i just pictured you coming out of your house in the spring like a pissed-off hungry bear out of hibernation.

 

It'll be in the spring. Every morning I'm liked a pissed-off hungry bear out of hibernation

 

Other members showed me how to make a door-dolly using my motorcycle lift. It really needs 4 independent rollers/wheels on it to make situating it easier.
Use a cloth-covered wooden shim between the underside of the door and the lift so the door sits correctly.
Strap the door to the cloth-covered "back-rest"....and you're good.
Now where is that pic

 

I think the difficulty with that would be that the hoist the car is on is 6 or 8 inches off the garage floor.

 

I think I might have the picture on my computer of the door dolly that Tony is talking about.
I’ll try to find it.
Even with your car on a lift, you could just make the door dolly a little taller and it would still work.

 

Do you think I'll be able to get it close enough to the car to work? The bed of the host is probably a foot or so away from the rocker panel of the car so that would be as close as I could get.

 

Here's the area a door dolly would have to work in. Is it going to be of help in this space or will I not be able to get the door dolly close enough to the car to work?