Stripping a car for paint

[hutch]

I've gotten far enough along in ripping apart my 900 that I am ready to start getting the body ready for paint and I have some questions for the painters on the board. I've studied Luke's EMS thread but I didn't want to clutter that thread up so I thought I'd make my own.

So far I have used a chemical stripper on a few certain spots and it's worked very well at getting down to bare metal but I wasn't sure if it would be better for the future paint job to leave the good factory primer? It always seems hard to get a paint job to look as good as a factory one so it seems a shame to get rid of the existing primer, especially when rust is not really an issue on the car. Is there any sanity to this or is it worth it to strip the whole car down to bare metal?

Also, are there any good websites for buying paint products? I can buy generic aircraft stripper around here but I would like to find a good quality aerosol primer so I can get the body completely ready to be sprayed by someone.

[Geoff]

If the car isn't really rusty I'd probably feel good about going down to the factory primer and leaving it. My justification is that it has protected the car this long...
What kind of paint job are you going to go with? Quick and cheap or super pro?

I've tinkered in body work but I'm no expert.

[Jordan]

The factory primer is pretty good stuff, I'd say keep it where you can. In fact on my 99 the car was stripped to bare metal and painted about 4 years ago by the previous owner...now it's bubbling and cracking and I'm going to have to repaint it. I'm also considering media blasting, but I have a few rust problems from the crappy primer

[Luke]

The 74 I am working on had many many coats of paint on it, and some were peeling down to the base metal in places from sitting outside I decided to chemically strip it down to bare metal. This is a long gooey process. Once it was down to bare metal, I still had to spot sandblast a lot of areas where there was surface rust. Looking back it would have been a lot easier to just take it to a media blaster (there is a place about 3 miles down the road) and just let them deal with it for $600. I've had body panels blasted there before and they use plastic media and can control it very accurately to leave the factory primer intact if it is in sound condition, or blast it off too if its not. I try to use a 2 part paint whenever possible but if just doing some touch ups or small sections for aerosol primer I use only SEM brand products which put all of the autoparts store stuff to shame. They are a little pricey but worth it imho.

[hutch]

Thanks for the advice, I am planning on getting it professionally repainted but certainly nothing concourse-winning quality. I guess I'll sand it down to the primer and call it a day.

[Crazyswede]

It occurs to me that you could try stripping the paint off with brake fluid. I dont know if it would work any better then the stripper or not. I do know that brake fluid will do bad things to paint in a short amount of time.

[Luke]

eww that sounds like a mess. Also I don't think it would work well at all on a modern urethane, some of the new urethanes have equivelant or better chemical resistance than powdercoating.

[hutch]

Thats not a bad thought, I have used some stripper that we had around the garage that is supposed to be used for things around the house as opposed to stripping a car and if I only let it sit on for a few minutes it would leave the primer behind. I suppose I could try that over the whole car but that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.


There is some surface rust in a few spots that I want to cover with some POR-15 before it gets painted, but will this stuff get rid of built up rust or is there anything better for that job?
http://www.por15.com/prodinfo.asp?grp=MR&dept=2

[RS68]

If your looking at POR you might want to look into KBS coatings. http://www.kbs-coatings.com/index.html They claim to be better than POR and its usually cheaper. I used it on the rear shock mounts that I had repaired on the 85 SPG. The three step process is time consuming and a little messy but I was happy with the way it came out. For built up rust its probably best to get as much rust off as you can even before using stuff like POR Metal Ready or KBS Rust Blast.

[hutch]

cheers for the link, I'll keep them in mind when I order something.

theres not really any areas of major rust on the car, just your average surface rust under the front seats and around the engine compartment. however I would like to add a coat of POR-15 or similar before it gets a paint job so that it will stay that way in the future.

[paulh]

If your looking at POR you might want to look into KBS coatings. http://www.kbs-coatings.com/index.html They claim to be better than POR and its usually cheaper. I used it on the rear shock mounts that I had repaired on the 85 SPG. The three step process is time consuming and a little messy but I was happy with the way it came out. For built up rust its probably best to get as much rust off as you can even before using stuff like POR Metal Ready or KBS Rust Blast.

I actually used their gas tank sealer recently on a scooter tank, worked quite well, seems like a very similar product to the POR, but cheaper.

Paul