Back Yard Paint Job! - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 25
On this episode of HOT ROD Unlimited
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00:00 On this episode of Hot Rod Unlimited, we're throwing a party and we have a special guest.
00:04 1967 Impala.
00:06 The reason we invited this car is because we want to paint it. It's ugly. It needs help.
00:10 We're going to attempt to paint this car in one day in a friend's backyard.
00:14 A few years back, David Freiburger bought this 1967 Impala.
00:24 A high mileage car, white.
00:26 They did the basics of installing your first engine.
00:29 It was a Smittings 383 crate engine with a Bowler 700R4 transmission.
00:34 And right after that, they did a vinyl wrap.
00:37 And it was right when Hot Rodding was first considering vinyl wrap as a viable option.
00:42 It's a big thing in motorsports, but nobody really in the Hot Rodding was doing it commonly until then.
00:47 And people hated it.
00:50 David claims it to be the most hated project car that Hot Rod has ever had.
00:55 We ripped off all the vinyl and decided to do something different with the Impala.
00:59 David sent it down to Pete Santini in Orange County, California to have a professional paint job done.
01:04 He did a great job on the car, but David picked out the color.
01:08 I love the fact that he went out on a risk with the color, but it just turned out to be ugly.
01:13 Oh, dude!
01:17 It looks like somebody puked on it.
01:19 Wow.
01:20 That is a whole lot of bad. That's what that is.
01:23 That is not good.
01:25 Fail.
01:26 Yeah, I really didn't get any better with them off.
01:27 Yeah.
01:29 After that, David decided to sell it.
01:32 He was actually getting ready to load it on the trailer and take it to the swap meet.
01:35 I said, "Hey, I've always wanted a convertible. '67 Impala is a really cool car. I'll buy it from you."
01:41 I low-balled him and took him about a week or so before he took me up on the offer, but I did finally buy it.
01:46 It kind of bred new life into the project car.
01:49 So somebody said, "Why don't we paint it?"
01:51 Everybody in the room kind of looked around, and we couldn't think of a good enough excuse not to, so we decided to do it.
01:57 The premise behind painting the car in the backyard was you can call up Summit, and they will send you an entire kit that includes paint, gun.
02:15 It even included a stand-up for us to make our own paint booth in the backyard.
02:19 Everything you needed, you don't necessarily need a paint shop.
02:21 We bought some extra stuff, but the biggest thing for us was manpower.
02:25 Doing it in such a tight time frame, we made it into a bit of a party to get our buddies there and help us.
02:30 We had the whole Hot Rod staff there, but we also called in Dennis Pitzenbarger with Hot Rod Magazine Live.
02:35 He's been doing this for several years now, so he was kind of our resident expert.
02:39 Preparation in a paint job is everything.
02:41 It doesn't matter how great I am with a gun or how great Jesse might be with a gun.
02:45 The reality of it is prep is everything in a paint job, and every painter will tell you that.
02:49 We first started with a DA on certain areas, and we were block sanding most of the area,
02:54 and we worked our way down until we were to a fine Scotch-Brite pads.
02:58 When you're sanding, you're really looking for making it dull, making it just enough for the paint to stick to,
03:04 but you don't want to make marks where the paint will stick inside of a mark or inside of a gash or anything like that.
03:10 You're basically just looking to dull the gloss down.
03:13 Luckily, the car had been professionally painted very close to the time frame of when we started working on it,
03:18 so they had done a lot of the body work.
03:20 We were just mainly scuffing up their layer of paint so that our new paint would adhere to it.
03:26 Despite it being Southern California, it decided to rain.
03:39 The entire reason why I bought the car was because it never rained in Southern California,
03:43 and halfway through our first day, it started raining.
03:45 Ultimately, it didn't slow us down that much in our prep work.
03:48 It just meant we went from dry sandpaper to wet sandpaper.
03:51 Dry sandpaper uses the dust that gets off of the paper itself.
03:55 The wet sandpaper just uses the water to get all the stuff that's coming off with the sandpaper.
04:00 It goes off into the water and just falls off out of the way.
04:02 When it starts to rain, it's California.
04:05 You just go underneath the car and use it as a terminal area.
04:08 Luckily, the rain didn't last too long. The sun came back out, and we started using dry sandpaper again.
04:13 We decided to go with a red color because all old muscle cars look good red.
04:17 Ideally, what you actually want to do when you change color is strip the interior,
04:21 take every panel off that you can take off, doors, fenders, everything, and paint them all individually.
04:26 But we don't have that long. We were trying to get this done in a day.
04:30 We're doing what's called jamming, and we're going to paint this through here with a spray paint
04:34 rather than pulling the panels off and painting it.
04:37 It's really kind of two trains of thought.
04:39 Some people, say a person in a professional refinishing shop, will have a paper tree,
04:45 which is tape hooked up to paper, pull it off in big sheets, and kind of do it like that.
04:49 Or you can do it the way we're going to do it today, which is more like edge it all out with tape.
04:53 You can see I'm kind of getting on the bumper but yet leaving a space for the paint here.
04:57 What I'll do is I'll edge all the little things that don't want to paint first.
05:00 Then we'll put some paper down to make sure we don't overspray his bumper.
05:04 [music]
05:14 Let that tack off really quick, let it dry, and then I'll hit it with a cover coat and it should be fine.
05:21 [music]
05:27 So it's about 6 o'clock right now. We're finishing up for the day.
05:30 We've gotten the car most of the way prepped.
05:32 We don't have anything taped off, but we've got most of the jams done and most of the sanding done.
05:36 It's been a fun experience. It's proof that anybody can go down to Summit, grab some stuff, and paint their car.
05:41 We've got a little bit more work to do. We're going to finish off the jams under the hood.
05:44 Technically, we're not doing it in one day, but we're still within plenty of the time frame.
05:48 We could easily do it tonight, right?
05:49 Yeah, we ran it. We fought wind, we fought rain, we fought temperature.
05:53 When you paint a car in the cold, the reality is we don't have $150,000 down draft.
05:57 So we don't need hour and a half flash time.
05:59 So instead of being here until 2 in the morning, we're going to fast forward until tomorrow and wrap it up.
06:03 [music]
06:16 Day two was less about the car and more about the paint booth.
06:19 One of the first things we did was finish masking the car.
06:22 We masked off the interior, the bumpers.
06:24 All we did was pull off the basic trim and taped off the rest.
06:28 Our biggest enemy in dealing with a backyard paint job is dust and dirt.
06:33 Brandon was in the paint booth cleaning it out.
06:36 And then when the paint job was ready, we laid water down.
06:39 And this was to keep me from kicking up dust as I was painting the car and to keep dust down and out of the paint.
06:45 Finally, after all this work, we got to what we actually came for, which was painting the car.
06:51 [music]
07:01 The paint suits were not only to protect our clothes and our body, but they were also to protect the car.
07:05 It would keep down dust and dirt and grease that's on our body and on our clothes.
07:10 So the first step was laying the primer sealer, just in case there was anything from the previous paint job that would affect our new paint job.
07:18 Things can come through primer, but things will not come through sealer.
07:22 Because of the red color, we wanted to use a lighter color sealer underneath it, so we used a light gray sealer.
07:28 Dennis was great. He showed a lot of different techniques.
07:32 When you're making a pass, you're spraying and letting off the product, not the air.
07:38 Here, I'll show you.
07:40 There, done.
07:42 See, I'm spraying, but I'm not spraying product.
07:46 [music]
07:48 We used a base coat clear coat system, which is a two-stage system, and we used a primer sealer.
07:53 So there's three layers of product on there.
07:55 The paint job is not a traditional gloss red. We have a nice, cool satin clear coat on top of it.
08:00 [music]
08:02 The painting process from the first time primer hit the body until the last time the clear hit the body felt like forever.
08:09 Ultimately, I think it was about two and a half or three hours.
08:12 It was such a thrill to know that we did this, and we pulled it off.
08:15 It looks really good.
08:17 For my first paint job I've ever done, I am really, really excited.
08:21 It's going to look awesome.
08:23 [music]
08:35 Since finishing the paint job, I can't stop driving it.
08:38 I absolutely love it, and I'm trying to make it a daily driver.
08:41 This is no longer a car I just bought. It's a car I drive and I painted.
08:45 It's pretty cool to pull up and park and shut the door and look back at the car and say, "You know what? I painted that."
08:51 [engine revving]
08:55 You can follow my blogs at blogs.hotrod.com, and I'll show you how I'm trying to make it a daily driver.
09:00 And what do you guys think? What should we do with this thing next?
09:04 What would make this car cool? Tell us in the comments below.
09:07 [music]