The Herald as she arrived from Jersey. The paint was very old and spotted with issues. The body also came with many dents and some rot, particularly in the door bottoms.
The first job was to strip the car of all its chrome, lights, windscreen, hood, handles and everything that would get in the way of a good paint job. This can take a while and decent records of how certain things came off are worth keeping!
The paint then needs to be sorted by sanding it down, filling where necessary and treating/replacing the rot. The doors were pretty bad but I cut out the worst bits and welded in new metal.
After a lot of work the body is ready for paint! The first coat is isolator followed by light grey primer.
Sometimes hidden issues can become more obvious once the car is in primer. So it’s a good time to spray on a guide coat (matt black) and then sand the flat areas of the car using a long block to see if there are any small dips, dents, holes or any other imperfections. I found that the rear wings were not quite flat so some thin skims of filler and filler primer followed by more guide coat and flatting with a block were used to get them looking nice and flat. I repainted the car with a slightly different shade of primer (I just added a blob of black primer into the grey to make it darker) just so I could see where I’d painted over the previous coat.
After the primer comes the top coat! This was 2K so needs no clear coat over the top. It still needs polishing though!
With all her chrome, lights, hood and all the other bits and bobs we’d taken off back on, she looked truly fabulous.
