Hi,
I'll bite!!.... what are HiLoks?
A VERY interesting discussion about painting at home!
So often the discussions about do it yourself paint jobs make it seem like it's something that you decide to do at lunch one day, and your done in time for supper.
Some MUCH better indications of what it REALLY takes here!
I'm enjoying following along!
regards,
Alan

 

A HiLok is a "rivet" type fastener used in aircraft. It has an advantage over traditional rivets in that it does not have to be bucked which in tight spaces like you find in planes and other applications is priceless. The fastener has a screw-on tail that can be held by a wrench while the head is screwed in, and when it reaches the proper compression the tail responds with a 'snap' which feels like the rivet breaking.

BTW Alan, thanks for all your help in recent threads. Also, may I congratulate you on your Top Flight. I am excited and motivated each and every time I see photos of your superior craftsmanship on that perfect machine!

Dan

Also to the OP, AWSOME job!!!

 

Alan, to get a little more insight as to how Hi-Loks can make your corvette restoration experience more enjoyable refer to the last 3 pages of Rogman's super-spectacular '73 vert resto[mod-o]ration over in the General section. if we get enough guys watching while he drops the body today it will likely be the first thread to have "gone viral" in Forum history!!

For your particular purposes, however, the temptation to use these advanced aerospace labor-saving devices must be resisted at all costs and I WILL NOT send you any!!! Very bad for NCRS mojo!!!

 

Hi Dan & Bird,
Yes the soft aluminium rivets have been a real challenge since I work by myself.
I've had to come up with some real contraptions to buck the head while I set the shaft. It would have been easier if on occasion I could have turned the body over, or stood it on end!
'Body drop' is probably THE biggest day after 'first drive'! I found it to be a cause for great trepidation, and then for great celebration!
Regards,
Alan

 

Coming from somebody who has shot probably 1 billion rivets into every crack and crevice any airplane ever had, installing solid rivets is all about practice and having the right tools. When I first started working on airplanes 37 years ago I used to look at their structure and think "they must have had to have a really expensive special tool to do almost all of this stuff" and as it turns out I was right. To have a really complete set of solid rivet installation tools you need at least three rivet guns, eight or ten drivers or 'sets', and probably 5 bucking bars. Then you need to install about 200 rivets just to get good enough at it to install them right most of the time. When I look at how well most of the rivets are installed by the factory on Corvettes...generally not one of them would pass inspection at any aircraft factory. Car factories have different criteria though so they only use rivets where they absolutely have to, and obviously welding is out of the question with a Corvette body. I'm sure some forum member could verify this but there must have been a station on the line where all the riveting was done at once, and just exactly the right tools were there to do just that job. Hi-Loks are pretty handy in the absence of all that stuff, and as a bonus they're about 4 times stronger than a typical aluminum solid rivet.

 

Hi,
AHHHH!!!
Now I understand "birdsmith"!!!!
Regards,
Alan

 

Rogman

 

I was a 'sheet metal' guy in the Air Force for my first few years and I wish I still had access to all those cool tools and fasteners. I did break down and buy a bucking bar and a rivet gun/air chisel for my resto. I had my wife help me with the installation, and after having her practice on some scrap she did a really good job with the bucking bar. She calls herself Rosie the riveter now... It's nice to be able to pull on life's experience now and then.

 

...Spent half of my weekend getting garage ('Man-Box') ready for the Big Final Push, then today rolled beast out into daylight and surrounded with plastic. Per Rogman I then slathered as much stripper as I could keep on the car....com/albums/aa473/Hueymaster99/DSC01874.jpg[/IMG]...After which I scraped profusely, leaving obscene piles of the most vile kind of toxic waste strewn upon my driveway. Fortuinately I was not visited by either Al Gore OR the HOA *****, so all is well at Casa de Birdsmith!

One quirk that I did run into was that when I applied stripper to my hood (whose yellow paint had been shaved off a couple weeks ago) the stripper went right through the thick gray primer/sealer that was there, then began bubbling up underneath it, so it wasn't really cutting through the primer but it was literally melting the factory green lacquer underneath. I think I saw a TV documentary where they think the atmosphere of Uranus is like that!

Seriously, what's left now is to sand through that icky ol' sealer (which cuts about as easily as joint compound so no real big deal there) and expose the original green paint, which Rogman assures me can then be removed with lacquer thinner, scotch-brite, and 1 million rags.

Finished up the the taxes this morning too, and looks like there will be $$$ in the budget for new carpet, weatherstrip, and a couple other goodies...life is GOOD!!

 

Yepper, that looks familiar (the paint mess, not the neat, organized garage--very nice)... The HOA ***** don't ever visit, they like to send mail a week later... I'll see if my outdoor sand blasting tent today will get an envelope in a week or so...

If the car was Green from the factory, you'll have one more round of stripping... You're looking to get to the factory primer (1973 was gray, believe earlier years used red oxide)... Once you get to the factory primer, get the lacquer thinner, scotch brites, shop towels, and most importantly, elbow grease...

Digging the Green Military Sticker--Pendleton, March, Miramar or other???

Looking good!!!

Rogman

 

Thanks for noticing my housekeeping efforts, Rog! You're right about the red primer...as for the sticker, it's an expired one from Camp Pendleton (last month, actually). I'm working down at North Island nowadays so if I'm ever gonna drive this baby to work the 5-speed swap will be next!. As I mentioned I'm going to cut through all that grey sealer with sandpaper before I get at it with the stripper again. 60 grit paper goes right through it so that shouldn't be too much work. Not sure what it is yet, but I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel!

 

I love the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel...

Rogman

 

my favorite primer is the yellow looking 2K primer. sticks to anything and everything. (ask me how i unfortunately know) base/clear is fairly easy. do a half overlap pattern for good even coverage, that goes for primer and paint. when sanding the primer start with around 220 and i like to end with 400 though some people have stopped at 320 (scares me). BE SURE TO USE GUIDECOAT. it can be anything you want really. they sell specifically formulated guidecoat crap for tons of money, but black spray paint works just fine for me. the special stuff is said to sink to the low places in the primer layer but enough spray paint and you'll get the picture.sand the primer until the guidecoat is just barely gone. just so long as you get a evenly smooth surface to paint you should be fine. i did one car where i missed a couple spots sanding the primer and it showed horribly. no amount of clearcoat sanding and buffing could fix it.
in short, the key to a good paint job is the prepwork. most other advice i can give seems to have been mentioned already. go for it and good luck

 

Hi rog and smith,
Paint coming OFF is almost as good as paint going ON.
I saved all the glop that came off my 71. It had never been repainted.
SO I'm working on a system to seperate the primer glop from the top coat glop, and will then re-constitute the old lacquer, and RE-SPRAY it on my car and it'll be an ORIGINAL paint car again.
Have just a few MINOR details to work out!?!?!
Regards,
Alan

 

Dave--

What's the latest???

Rogman

 

Still plugging away. I've got all the topcoat off of the front clip and have been stripping sections of the original green underneath.Hopefully in a week or so the front clip will be clean, but this weekend is off cuz of wifey's birthday. I don't work overtime on Saturdays anymore so that freed up the weekends which has helped (I was recently promoted from 'birdsmith' to evaluator) but my commute has doubled so it makes it kinda hard to get things done during the week. I'll spend a little time on it tonight and post a few pics when it's all cleaned off. After that it's finish the last door jamb, then I can start cleaning up the small parts. Hopefully by early summer I'll be shooting paint!

 

Awesome, understand about getting stuff done after work... I have great intentions until I get home, eat, help son with homework, play with the dog, watch American Idol, etc...

I'm out this weekend as well... Taking the family to Six Flags Magic Mountain on Saturday... Will get back after it on Sunday...

Rogman

 

...Actually made some decent progress today. After ten months of listening to others' advice and trying every possible getting-paint-off-without-destroying-my-Corvette theory imaginable I think I finally arrived at the conclusive process for MY car. YOUR mileage may vary, but this is what finally did it for mine.

-First, shave whatever paint I could get off the top with a well-sharpened putty knife, then attack what I couldn't get off with the knife with stripper.

-Next, plow through the layer of gray primer under the top two coats of paint either by hand with 60 grit paper or with a DA and 80 grit if the surface is flat enough to do so without inadvertently blazing through all that paint and going into the glass...

-After that, apply another coat of stripper, let it sit for about 10-15 minutes, and manually grind the stripper into the paint with a small wire brush until all the factory topcoat is loosened. Once that occurrs, shovel the gooey mess into a suitable receptacle.

-Next, scrub the surface with scotch-brite pads soaked with lacquer thinner, wiping it down with thinner-soaked paper towels afterwards. This gets all the remnants of the topcoat off, leaving only the red factory primer underneath...

-After that, wet sand the entire panel with 320 grit paper. After about 2 hours of hard labor, you get THIS-

Nice, clean, virgin factory fiberglass. I still have to finish stripping the underside of the nose and the front of the left-side door jamb (which will be a PITA because you have to remove the lower dash to get the door hinge out and I really don't want to do that again), but once that is done all that is left to complete sanding the body will be wet-sanding each corner, I figure about ten hours of work.

A couple days ago Santa Claus (He works for the IRS!) brought me a new set of DeVilbiss Starting Line paint guns and about $1000 worth of new carpet, trim pieces, and interior hardware, weatherstrip, door felts, etc., so I'm actuially starting to get excited about this thing...realistically by maybe the first part of June I can actually start laying down some paint

 

While i'm very happy for you and the progress you've made Birdmsith, I am at the same time sickened by the amount of work I have ahead of me! I've yet to start this process and am really not looking forward to it. You've done some good work and the end of the tunnel is near, Congrats.

Isn't it amazing how hard it is to remove a paint job, yet it's amazingly simple to destroy it with a runaway shopping cart or errant Frisbee toss?

 

What I have learned in all of this is that if I had applied the technique to every panel on the car that I used on the hood I would be a lot further ahead by now, but because I kept experimenting I wound up expending a lot more calories and getting a lot less accomplished than I might have otherwise. Among the things I have learned-

Stripper doesn't really work on primer. Neither does shaving. Sanding and/or media blasting is the only thing that works on primer, and if you're worried about going through the paint and into the glass you've got a lot of elbow grease ahead of you.

It is faster to shave paint off (if you can) than any other removal method except media blasting.

The best method of using stripper that I have found is putting it on, letting it dwell for a few minutes, then grinding away at it with a wire toothbrush until you've gotten to the bottom of it. After that you can shovel it away with a plastic bondo scraper or whatever.

The biggest issue/problem in my case was that my car already had three paint jobs on it, and the second paint job was base/clear polyurethane, so, three different paint jobs with two different kinds of paint. Big PITA whan using stripper.

At the end of the day, the best/ fastest/ most modern/ most effective way to get an old paint off of a Corvette is soda blasting. I have no idea how much that even costs, but in hindsight I at least should have looked into it...never hurts to ask!