Peter (or anyone),

When prepping at home, what do you recommend? I have some paint stripper, but many people seem to be sanding their little hearts out.

As the quality of the end result is directly attributable to the quality of the prep work, how do you go about prepping a car in the best way so you can simply trailer the car to a paint booth and get someone to apply two pack to it?

I'm thinking:

strip back paint
rust repair
smooth over imperfections with ?
rust treatment ?
spray on primer ?

Andrew

I used paint striper to do my cars back to bare metal. less work than sanding, but you need gloves and plenty of thinners to wash it completely after stripping

in the water restrictions in sydney atm its a lil hard to use strippers as you usually have to hose it off...........

I Just Use A Wire Wheel On A Grinder, Works Great, Be Sure To Put Safty First Though, Mask, Muffs, Goggles, Will Take A Full Day To Bare Metal This Way,

Drawbacks, Noisy, Dusty Smelly

But A Great Finish

Andy

Andrew with the paint stripper get some 36 grade grit paper and scratch the old paint about a bit before applying the stripper. This make it activate and get under the existing paint quicker. Use a paint scrapper and rubber gloves and dont flick the stuff in yr eyes.

Wash it off good with water especially around the seams then wipe of with thinners. Or you can apply a rust converter or a wipe with some oil on a rag, this will hold it untill you get to the panel shop.

How good do you want the job to be? How long do you want it to last?

Ideally you should strip the whole shell to bare metal inside & out.

There are several options.

Bead blast all in & out

Sand blast all except outside panels, and paint strip roof & quarter panels. (This is what I did with my EH.)

Sand/ wire brush/ paint strip until bare metal.

I used deoxidine/ metal prep on the outside panels that I paint stripped. The sand blasted areas were super super clean already.

I then applied Spies Hecker red brown two pack primer to the inside & out of the whole shell. I had no rust holes so I was doing it easy at this stage.

All filler work was done on top of the red brown.

You can just strip the outside if you want and prime it with a standard etch primer.

There are no exact list of rules, so work within your time frame, budget & experience.

Do the body filler repairs with a good quality K&H or Septone filler and finish with 240 if you wish not to get shrinkback. You will also be able to feel any iperfections that are normally hidden by rough grit finish.

Two pack primer filler over the whole thing and you are on your way.

It is not easy and certainly cant be explained in depth just by typing here. Give it your best shot and see what you come up with. :thumb