I had a thought--Why do we NOT talk about...?

adam525i said:

I mentioned NoHome's threads but Dusterbd13's work is very impressive as well and probably a bit more approachable for most of us.

Getting mentioned in the same sentence as no home is like me climbing in the ring with Muhammad Ali and thinking I can box. I ain't got E36 M3 on no home. But thank you for the High Praise. I don't have talent I have tenacity and the willingness to be wrong repeatedly until I get it right. Body work for me is about admitting that I don't know what I don't know and learning about it and applying it until I understand it. Every car I do gets a little bit better.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

We don't really discuss religion, and bodywork is voodoo best left to those who are masters of the arcane dark arts.

Bodywork and electrical things, I leave that to the people who know better than me. 

As I've gotten older, I have found myself capable of doing body work reasonably well. It's all about patience coupled with using high quality products. It took me decades to build the patience.

When I see someone use the word "Bondo" I know they're gonna have a hard time. It takes modern products of high quality  to do it properly and easily. Poly primers and lightweight body filler are brilliant. Bondo brand anything is E36 M3. Most aerosol paint and body products are E36 M3 to be honest.

I just built a minitruck and did all the paint and body using Summit branded products in my garage and people who have seen it have given it a lot of compliments.

Being old has some advantages.

(I'll quit typing now, I have to go pee)

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

We do talk about body work.

But it's how you found a washing machine on the side of the road, cut it apart, and used it to fab floor pans for your Miata/Volvo/Zamboni Challenge car while adding zero cost to your Challenge budget. Body filler is from dumpster diving and paint is house paint swiped from the chemical disposal area at your local dump applied with $1 rollers from Dollar Tree.

And yet somehow some of you manage to make it look like a Chip Foose show car.

Voodoo.  

Dusterbd13 said:

adam525i said:

I mentioned NoHome's threads but Dusterbd13's work is very impressive as well and probably a bit more approachable for most of us.

.... I don't have talent I have tenacity and the willingness to be wrong repeatedly until I get it right. Body work for me is about admitting that I don't know what I don't know and learning about it and applying it until I understand it. Every car I do gets a little bit better.

And that last paragraph, in a nutshell describes the whole process. 

I will never admit to being "Good" at bodywork, because I am slow and inefficient. But I do tend to like swimming  with sharks in the deep end and not giving up. The "feel good" feedback loop for me is getting any one task of the project completed to my satisfaction; then I move on to the next for another round of feel-good. The fact that it all ends with another car in the shop is kinda never the point. I can buy cars if I need transportation.

This was my first ever car project. It had some corrosion concerns and I wanted to learn how to MIG weld.  That in itself was the goal. 

So I am not sure what kind of "bodywork" thread we would want to run. Rust repair? Collision repair? Paintless Dent Removal? Race-car un-demo repair? Panel Fabrication? Repaint the Car Repair? It kind goes on forever.

What might be good is a thread titled: "How do I un-berkeley this piece of my car's body" that would serve as a rolling anecdotal encyclopedia of required repairs and approaches.

NOHOME said:

What might be good is a thread titled: "How do I un-berkeley this piece of my car's body" that would serve as a rolling anecdotal encyclopedia of required repairs and approaches.

That's a really good idea.

In reply to NOHOME :

How do you apply paint so that it looks good, without orange peel or other faults, without spending so much time and money on equipment and materials that it would have been cheaper to just buy a nicer car and spend the time driving it instead of turning your driveway weird colors.

The OEs turn out amazing paint jobs with minimal prep and no afterprep like 200 hours of wet sanding.  I've seen amazing rattle can paintwork and cars that look less good than a roller and brush job despite using better equipment.

Relevant to the thread, the house we just made an offer on has a side garage that can be considered to be a paint booth...

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Do not confuse the fact that I do this stuff with the me doing it all that great. I refuse to color-sand  paint so I try to get it right-enough out of the gun. 

If you are just doing a paint-job, I doubt we at home  guys can get it under 100 hours to do a really nice job. Add like 40 to cut and buff if you swing that way.

Do you play video games? Think back to the first time you picked up the controller and did not have a clue what any of the buttons did. Fast forward to today when maybe you operate it without conscious thought and can concentrate on the visuals on the screen.  That is your paint gun. If you set it up properly and wave it around properly with properly mixed product, it will lay down and look good. There is no getting around learning curves.

Applying color is not my favourite part of the game. I do not like the toxic nature of the product and it leaves my shop a different shade than the shade it was when I started.

I have a good friend who paints cars in his garage. He refuses to spend more than $200 Cnd and shoots Rustoleum or some even cheaper product from Canadian tire. Results are scary nice at  a glance. His secret is gun time. He has spent a lot of time spraying heavy-equipment for a company that refubished and resells the stuff.

Here is a link to a YouTube channel that best sums up the life we live as car-hobby guys. This guy gets it and tells it like it is. Best if you can find a Google Translate to convert from Canadian to English.

https://www.youtube.com/@kars_tony

In reply to NOHOME :

ShawnG said:

I'm really good at paintless dent installation.

An under rated super power.  

Whatever you do, just don't look at 275nart's Volvo P1800 thread.  Just don't  do it.

Chris Tropea said:

I was thinking about this last week. I got a quote for a PDR repair and the number had me thinking maybe I could try it myself.... 

I'll admit to looking at PDR tools on the River site, may have even put them in my cart, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

I figure I can't make it worse, right?

No Time said:

I'll admit to looking at PDR tools on the River site, may have even put them in my cart, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

I figure I can't make it worse, right?

Jerry From LA said:

Whatever you do, just don't look at 275nart's Volvo P1800 thread.  Just don't  do it.

Apparently all those old Ferraris were hand built.  Makes sense in hindsight.

I read an article about a high end auto painter, where he did a lot of older classics.  When working on those old Ferraris, he'd be annoyed at how the left side and right side would be different, so he'd cut panels and grilles out and form new ones to much closer tolerances.

If body work doesn't involve bolting something on or off, I'm not interested 

In reply to NOHOME :

Buddy's got a Grade A hoser accent eh?

I enjoy bodywork, but by that I mean filler work, prep and paint. I used to build custom industrial equipment in my 20's and learned to paint doing that. Later I built stock cars and painted them in my garage with Tremclad/Rustoleum, with an electric Wagner gun even, and got pretty good at it. 

I can't do sheet metal work worth a E36 M3, but I can make a car look good enough that even a lot of car guys can't tell it was done on the cheap.

If you're going fast enough, a poor paint job doesn't matter.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

I read an article about a high end auto painter, where he did a lot of older classics.  When working on those old Ferraris, he'd be annoyed at how the left side and right side would be different, so he'd cut panels and grilles out and form new ones to much closer tolerances.

That's why his paint jobs cost upward of $50,000 and that was about 15 years ago.  I read the same article.

In reply to Jerry From LA :

I remembered that his name/nickname was Junior.

By recollection,  $50k was the low end, and it went way way up from there.  'Course, the level of detail was high.

google searching "ferrari junior repaint" is not returning anything useful.

Edit: Junior's House of Color.  I found an article from Sports Illustrated, but I'm fairly sure that I'd read it in C&D.  Photos are gone from linkrot.

A paint shop I know of was at the point of putting samples under a microscope to see what kind of dirt and fuzz was ending up in their paint while in the paint booth.

They were finding fibers from blue towels.

In reply to ShawnG :

Blue towels and red rags are forbidden from internal engine work for this reason.  Wipe one across the unmachined part of a crankshaft or something and look at all the fuzz ready to sling off and plug an oil filter.

Lintless paper towels only, or a squirt bottle full of acetone and no wiping at all, for engine work.  I'm still nostalgic for the smell of acetone and Safety Kleen fluid as it reminds me of the machine shop where I used to work.

ShawnG said:

If you're going fast enough, a poor paint job doesn't matter.

 

So it's not that my bodywork sucks - my car is just too slow. Thanks! 

My Mini thread here is mostly bodywork now, and will be for quite some time!

I'm ok doing the metal work, but the finish stuff I send to my buddy in exchange for me building him engines and gearboxes. He loves sanding, says it's a "zen" thing, he gets in a groove and can do it for hours at a time. I say..... good for him!

He's pretty good with a gun too, lays it down real smooth, but since his paint booth such as it is is a couple of tarps hung from the ceiling and a box fan blowing out the back door, he does have to color sand and buff......

I just turned this:


Into this:

I didn't talk about it mostly because I didn't think it'd interest anyone, but also because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.  If we talked about it more, maybe I'd have a better idea!

In reply to Berck :

You cant just drop a picture of your Formula V with a half built aircraft behind it and not talk about said aircraft. What is it?

Pete