Part XVIII

1989 RS Camaro

Alright, life is good and we actually made some progress on the bodywork. As we worked our way around the car, more than a few dents and dings revealed themselves to us, but with a little bit of sanding and a smudge of bondo, we once again have flat panels to spray.

The first order of business before laying any paint on the outer body was to get the door jambs done on the car. Quite a bit of scrubbing, cleaning and of course a bit of sanding was required to get the result you see here. They turned out well, and with just a light scrubbing from a 3M pad they will be ready for the color coat.

After that was accomplished, we decided to let the primer dry and harden for a few days, so we switched up gears and got back into the transmission business.

This is part of the guts of a TH350 unit that will end up as the spare for the car. It will be equipped with a 34 member sprag and hardened race, transbrake valve body, deep pan, re-worked pump and of course all new clutches, steels, seals and bearings. We didn't take the time to take any pictures during the teardown and assembly of the original transmission, but we will take some when we assemble this transmission; just so you have an idea of what goes into one of these. Once again, we are not transmission mechanics by any degree, but like every other part on this car, there's not much that we can't fix if we put our mind to it. We ended up replacing the busted case with a new one ourselves after getting an estimate of $700 to do the work. Our cost besides the labor was $75 for the case, a can of spray paint at $4.50, and a soft seal kit for a TH350 ran about $25.00. That's about $600 that stayed in our pocket and can buy a few more "go fast" parts.

Not much to look at, but this is the deep pan and shift cable setup for the the transmission that had the case replaced. Once again, we were plenty busy just getting this thing out, pulled apart and put back together again. We had the work done in two evenings.

And while we were under the car, we had mentioned before that we would be replacing the original Holley Blue pump with a BG 280 unit and here it is. Worked out really well for us, as we only had to drill two new holes in our old mounting bracket and it dropped right into place.

I am pretty sure that any fuel issues that we had before are now taken care of. We'll keep our fingers crossed of course!

Back to the body again, we primed the area behind the taillights just to make sure that when we go to the color coat that we didn't miss anything. Most of this area is hidden by the tail lamp assemblies that run the entire width of the car, but there are some small areas of the sheet metal that are exposed so better safe than sorry.

This is how you build a paint booth in your garage, about $10 worth of 2 mil plastic sheeting. We hung it up with our trusty 200 mph tape mainly with the idea of keeping the amount of paint dust all over everything down to a minimum.

These are actually after shots as we had plastic hanging up around the entire car making almost a complete circle of it, save for the main garage door. We had to take some of it back down to get the garage door open, but you get the general idea.

For this project and because we are painting at home, we are using lacquer paint products. The newer 2-part paints are certainly exceptional, more durable and about 10 times harder to apply correctly that lacquer. They are also very dangerous to the human body, so if you decide to go that route pay attention to all of the warnings and buy the required safety equipment. For Lacquer, a good general purpose charcoal canister style paint mask is about all you need.

Phillip spent the evening wiping the car down, cleaning it multiple times and then masking it off. Just before we applied the primer, he wiped the car down with a tack rag one more time to try and get as much dust off of the surface as possible. With that, we adjusted the gun which is one of the newer HVLP type and preceded to apply a fairly heavy coat of primer. I have to admit that I love these newer guns as the amount of material that goes on the surface is far superior to the old style and it doesn't create as much air-born mess either.

You can probably notice a bit of streaking in the roof panel on this shot, it's a large piece with nothing to break it up and I was having a touch time keeping my spray passes even. Next time, I am going to use a milk crate to get up a little higher and that should help even out the spray pattern. As it is primer, it will be knocked down with some 600 grit paper before color goes on so it's okay.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the results, even though it was a bit colder than we would have liked it to be for painting a car. Primer is usually not that big a problem with temperatures, but the color coats are going to have to go with a bit more heat in the air. When we started on this we had maybe 50-55 degrees of air temperature, but it dropped during the 2 hours that it took to apply the primer. That's right, this is 2 hours of painting.

You can hardly see it here, but the hood was held up in the air a little bit with paint sticks between the dzus brackets and the bottom of the hood. This allowed me to get some primer on the side edges of the hood. Painting the hood scoop was a real treat, the gun was a bit too large to actually fit, so a bit of tilting got some decent coverage on the bottom front part and underneath the air inlet. I think when I paint the door jambs with color, I will paint this area of the scoop too. The touch up gun is much smaller so I am sure I can do a better job.

One last shot, this the panel that we now refer to as the "panel from hell". If you remember from earlier articles that this panel was in seriously sad shape, it had been hit pretty good and then someone had taken a carpenter's hammer to it. I tried to work the metal back into shape, but it was stretched to badly, so I ended up cutting it out and making a replacement part. Quite a bit of work later and a coat of primer, and we are very impressed with the outcome.

We also have failed to mention in the past that we do have some good supervision during most of work on this project. One of our supervisors came by the other day and peaked in the door to see how our progress was going; his name is Jackson - but we just call him the boss.

See you next time, depending on the weather around here, we might have some color on the car.

Checkout the next update.