What a $10,000 Show Car Paint Job Looks Like!

oh with the EM1 in the body shop we're ready to start the body work now first

what

we're going to do is take the doors off we're going to get everything we can out of the car so we can have a good clean. refinish around all those edges, so removing these doors will be the first task and removing all the stickers from the VTEC stickers and the SI stickers on the back, that's

what

we were doing there now, the first step and the first process will be By blocking it, we'll use the existing

paint

, which is still good, as our guide to

show

us where our little waves are now.

Overall, this car looked very, very straight, but we wanted to add a little bit of putty to make sure it's 100% straight and

looks

great when going down the road, so we blocked all of this out with 180 grit to smooth it out as best as possible. that we were able to to give it a good adhesion for when we put some of our body filler on for glazing and We can see here on our side panel on our trunk, we're using that long block and those long strokes will allow for smoother looking finishes once the

paint

settles.

This will be a body filler for glazing that is now super super thin. we can put this on top of our sanded paint if it's good paint, if it's not good paint, which we'll see later, you're going to have to remove it to make it very, very, very thin, it's not a thick filler, so you want to make sure that if you have dents before this, you need to go ahead and remove those dents because this is not thick enough to fill. Think of it as a thick primer that will go into any tiny little waves and once we sand it down it will be much flatter so let's put all the body filler down and after a good 30 minutes it will be ready to sand.

Now we're using 180 grit here on the block once again and you'll see how We're sanding and about 90% of this filler comes off and it's only left in the very shallow areas and we're going to take the same position on each part. It's a lot, but you know, blocking it is going to really level it out and you can't do this with a sander or anything because everything has to be done by hand to make sure it's properly flattened, so once again we'll start by cutting it with an 80 and then we'll go to 180 to smooth it out and the technique we're using is a crosshatch pattern that we're almost sanding in X style and this will ensure that the filler is actually sand. and uniform throughout the body panel, we remove the hood of the car and that is where we are going to begin the body work.

Now we have Diaz circling the small dents that aren't so obvious. Now this whole area is a little wobbly. So we're going to put Bondo in here just to smooth it out with a nice thin coat, and there are some little dings and dents that you might miss once you go to sand it, so now's the time to get those, so let's start. taking this off and putting some caulk on it and smoothing it out completely oh and we're putting all of our pieces in caulk first before priming now we went to the ceiling and the ceiling had old paint on it and it was cracking so it was.

It's not a good substrate, okay, it's a good base to put filler or paint on top of because it was going to crack again if the bottom layer is not good, so we had to reduce this to the metal and you can see it was a lot. A lot of work, but the final process was beautiful. Now the entire car had the same paint that was on the roof. We would have to perform the same task, but luckily for us, the paint was in very good condition and was a good base to do some body work. finished, so we start by mixing our DT M, which is a direct to metal primer that will protect any of the metal surfaces like the roof here and all the other panels that are still

show

ing metal, so we'll go ahead and get everything. all primed now, oh and there are still many more parts as we finish this primer that will receive some work, although the new parts like the fender and front bumper cover will not need any body work or primer. like this one that we're going to show you in the next episode when it comes to prepping these parts and applying a red primer to them and then eventually painting them, so we'll also look at the body moldings, the side mirrors, the spoiler, all the accessories that really come together and Make this EM1 what it was when it rolled off the showroom floor, so now is the time we've been waiting for to get the real vehicle as Santa and ready to paint.

Now the way I do things is a little different when I tackle a restoration type of job, so the way I like to do it is I like to focus my attention on painting the ceiling first, however, I'll go ahead and I'll sand the entire vehicle just to make sure we do a final prep. We have all our bases covered and there is nowhere we have to go back and touch up, so go ahead and we will completely sand the entire vehicle with a P600 grit DA sander, this will allow for a nice smooth finish for our paint to set.

Now once it's completely sanded we're going to go ahead and put it in the paint booth and you'll notice once again I'm going to paint the roof and the reason is this car is a little bit higher up it's on jack stands and we're tilted and we really want to execute a beautiful job on the roof so we're going to focus our attention on the roof just so we can tilt it and get it nice and shiny and then from there what we're going to do is we're going to be able to get it out again and then focus on the rest now for the Milano Red paint.

I take an empty gallon and then I'm going to mix 127 Oz alone. less than a full gallon and we'll take all the toners and mix them together, we'll take a few different colors to make this beautiful Milano Red color, whether it's red, burgundy, white or black, all those mixes. Get to the actual formula to give you that beautiful Milano red that we have all come to love over the years. Once we have the reducer in there, it's ready to use and we can just mix it in and then pour it in. our PPS cup and let's start spraying, so let's go ahead and spray this roof and then we'll continue with the rest of the body.

Now, with the roof all shiny, we can unmask the rest of the vehicle and start prepping and painting the rest of the vehicle here, so basically we'll put it back on after it's all been masked off and we'll just focus on the side panels and on doing the jams, now the reason you would paint a car completely separate is because you want to wrap the paint around all the edges, now we're going to start here at the front, we're going to work our Jam area up to the quarters of panel and this is just a great way to get a full paint job now keep in mind this project is a full restoration job this is not a normal paint job that you would have done in a shop they are just going to spray the exterior and that is all, but this is We are doing a full restoration job on this EM1 and something like this takes a lot of time and effort to prepare each surface.

There was no panel or surface area on this vehicle that was ready to paint every square inch. It is necessary to prepare it thoroughly so that when the paint sets well it

looks

this beautiful. Now we're using our red base coat over our red primer so it covers pretty well and we came out of this with about three coats total. the surfaces now you'll see in the next few clips that we're going to spray the doors and the rest of the vehicle parts that will be installed on this beautiful EM1 so after the base coat you can see that it's flashing and drying with a little bit of shine and is ready for your clear coat.

Now we just apply two coats of clear to the entire vehicle with a high solids clear, like this one. Only two coats of clear are needed. In the old days you would put three or four coats of clear, well one coat of high solids clear is about two or three of the old style clear coat so it's very thick and very scratch resistant UV with absolutely beautiful shine, so let's go ahead and clear up the rest of this. Wow, and this EM1 has never shined like this, not even in the factories, which we talked about before about getting full paint coverage on all of our surfaces, so we'll start on the inside of the doors, making sure to prepare them properly so that when You open that door, you'd never know they were repainted at one point.

We made sure to take our paint around the rail where the window goes and all the way around the inside of the jam. We are also following the same. process and our paint will always match because it comes from the exact same container, so we don't have to worry about painting at separate times because it's the exact same process for each and every part. I prefer to paint all the parts separately because to get a cleaner and nicer finish with that beautiful finish on the door. We had to make sure there was a beautiful finish inside the hood as well, so that's exactly what we did here.

We wanted to make sure this project was completely hidden and you'll see. In later clips we pretty much glossed everything no matter where it was on the vehicle and this takes a lot of work, a lot of sanding, you need to use your brown pad to get into every crack and edge so you don't have any peeling paint and first we put a red sealer here and a sealer is basically a primer that doesn't need to be sanded and this could have easily been a primer if it had been mixed differently but the layer of sealer is all you have.

What you need to do is cover it with your red Milano base coat and you're done, and then two coats of our clear coat and it'll be nice and shiny again, brighter than most cars you'll see on the road where we have this on the inside . the hood now we'll follow it around the outside once again using our red sealant and we'll follow the same process that we've been doing on the entire vehicle, we'll go ahead and Milano and then we'll continue. Go ahead and apply a clear coat after that and the hood looked amazing. I can't wait to show you how absolutely stunning, beautiful and shiny this EM1 hood turned out.

You always want to make sure that on any vehicle you paint, the entire vehicle. It looks good but you have to make sure the hood is completely crisp and beautiful because it's the focal point of any vehicle it's the first thing you see from the front so we'll move on to the back and remember where we showed you and I told them about how we're going to shine every surface, that's exactly what we're doing. You can see that the inside of the trunk is completely base coat and clear coat, so when you open the trunk wide, you'll know what it is.

I got the same finish and the same treatment as the rest of the real vehicle and just look at how awesome it looks, this makes me really happy and when all the pieces are finished the puzzle pieces come together on the car and it looks absolutely awesome. We'll follow the same treatment on the outside of the trunk as well as our other parts that we have for the vehicle, that trunk came out beautiful, now we'll move on to the bumper covers and the front lips and things of that nature when it comes down to this . OEM part.

I like to go ahead and prime first and I'm actually going to prime all the pieces that should be black because later I come back to paint the sem moldings and I'm going to paint them black once they're Dy this is the cleanest. And the easiest way to do it I felt over the years of painting these pieces, so we have our rear lip here, which was in excellent condition and they are very hard to find, so just a little bit of wear, maybe some primer and some areas for this part and we're moving and rolling on this and other parts in the paint booth which we'll show you here in a moment, but you can see how many puzzle pieces it takes to complete a job like this .

This is a complete restoration painting. work on each playpen is sanded, every playpen is completely painted and that takes time and energy and you can see the amount of work and materials put into a job like this and the finished product looks impressive so we'll go ahead and check We remove the covers of the fog lights that way we cut them out before we do the paint job just in case so we mark them and use a salol type tool and that really helps but it's always important to drill a hole first so you can fit that Salol there and I drill them into the corners and it makes things a lot easier when it comes to cutting these fog light covers.

Now on each of these bumpers you have a trace line that you follow and I just highlighted. that in yellow just to make it a little easier to cut so you can see it before you cut because you don't want it to slip when you do this type of work, especially on an OEM bumper cover that is brand new.So once we've got all of this cut out, we're going to continue over to the paint booth and paint all of our pieces good, oh n oh oh.