The 68 Convertible Gets a Paint Job

68/70Vette

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Jun 19, 2008
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Location
Torrance, Ca.USA
I painted it myself in the early 1980's in lacquer. Storage damage incidents and aging meant it needed to be repainted.

I drove the car to a local Corvette body shop with a good reputation. Actually I've used them in the past for parts, mechanical repair and everything was very reasonable. For the 68 Convertible, their basic repaint cost was about $10,500. A little sticker shock here, but I agreed. What do you get for the $10,500? First of all they de-chrome the car...all the chrome pieces are removed including the door lock surfaces on the door, door handles, etc. The only thing they don't remove is the stainless steel trim around the window. Also, they removed the convertible top. Next they removed all the paint/primer down to bare fiberglass. For the relatively large flat expanses of the body surface, the used pneumatic orbital sanders. For the nooks and crannies it was all hand sanding. Included in the $10,500 is labor and material to grind out and re-seal the original body panels seams For example, the front "clip" ...the body work in front of the doors is comprised of about 6 or 7 panels bonded together. Similarly several panels behind the doors. They grind out the seams and re-epoxy them. Next, for the $10,500, they use say...a Windex spray bottle filled with alcohol. Now they are looking for micro-cracks in the fiberglass surface. The entire surface gets spritzed with alcohol about 1 foot in diameter. The wet surface on the car now looks a dark grey. A towel is rubbed across the surface, and the surface alcohol soon evaporates.....but the wet alcohol in the micro-cracks is still observable. Areas on the surface where the micro-cracks are highlighted with a black felt pen. Of the $10,500, the cost of repainting itself is about $3600...Forget exactly the brake down, but I think it's about $1600 for paint and materials and about $2000 for labor. They do fine sand the final paint surfaces.

Also, as a part of this very intrusive examination of the 68 surfaces it was pointed out that the hood didn't match all that correctly. This was the result of a front end collision repair in the late 60's. Also, the doors did not match exactly with the rear quarter panels and the convertible lid.......this was a production fault ...not accident repair. The door skins did not exactly match up with the front clip either.

I agreed for the extra body work. For the front hood alignment problem, they broke the inner front wheel wells free from the front clip and also broke the front clip loose in the front. They shifted all the pieces around, added some fiberglass/resin were needed and ground down the fiber/glass resin.

Adding fiberglass/resin and shaping..the rear of the doors, the rear quarter panels, and the convertible lid now all match perfectly. The door skins now match up with the front clip. This makes up for factory miss-matches.

About those micro-cracks. They grind down the area where the cracks are and splot the area with a fiberglass/resin patch. Later they grind it back to the original surface contours...some artistry is involved here.

In addition to micro-cracks, there's a WD-40 problem! To protect all the chrome pieces I kept them covered in WD-40. Every few months I'd clean off the WD-40...it'd attract dust...and re-apply the stuff. I'd just spray it on the chrome and wasn't concerned about overspray on the painted surfaces. Unfortunately the paint had cracks in it I couldn't see, and WD-40 has in places soaked into the fiberglass. The areas of soaked fiberglass aren't to large, so they too have been ground out and covered with a larger fiberglass/resin patch that will have to be ground down...From now on I'll use a wax to protect the chrome. I have 69 factory sidepipe housings and I don't want them to corrode ($2500 replacement cost.)


There's just a tremendous amount of hand work involved...a lot of it is probably tedious. So far they are doing a good job....the weeks roll by, but i don't drive the car that much anyhow.

I never realized that painting a 46 year old fiberglass car would involve the expenses of repairing fiberglass aging.

I'll keep everyone posted as we finally finish up with paint. Here in Cali it's water based paint which is what a lot of original car manufacturers use anyhow. Light Bright metallic blue...aka Le Mans Blue.
 
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Lot of money but it sounds like it's going to be well spent.... no photos???

I have an iPad so I'm going to have to learn how to post photos! I think it's easy touse an Ipad to email a photo taken with the iPad.

Maybe install the photobucket application in the Ipad, that way pictures would get directly uploaded to your photobucket account.
 
I'll have to delay with pictures.

The body work as been done and the car has been primered and block sanded once. It's been primered again for another block sanding sequence. After they primer paint the car, they spray little black lines on it. I guess this is to identify wavy parts of the body.

Their body guy appears to have good artistic talents. Quite a few places on the body were ground down..microcracks, oil contamination...then fiberglass and resin was applied and then ground down to the exact body contours. On one door there was an approximate 2 by 5 inch portion of the fiberglass contaminated by WD-40. I'd been spraying WD-40 on the factory chrome plated sidepipe covers. There was a $390 labor bill to grind out and repair this blemish!!!!!
 
I've got some jpeg photos, I'll look into posting them. The car has now been painted. Immediately after the color coat, it was clear coated. Then polished. None of the chrome trim has been added yet. It's really beautiful, particularly now since all the body panels, hood, convertible deck lid, doors are all matched up and smoothly alighned. When the car came from the factory, the convertible deck lid, rear quarter panel, door didn't match very well..maybe almost 1/4 inch for the convertible deck lid. No more.

To get the hood to match, they broke the inner wheel well panels and even broke the the whole front clip loose. The inner wheel wells were then rebonded. Moving the inner wheel wells was a part of the hood alignment/matching process. They also added a thin fiberglass layer on the front clip surrounding the hood and then ground down the fiberglass for a perfect fit of hood and front clip. Bottom line, the hood and front body alighnment is now perfect.

The crease line on the door didn't match up the corresponding lines on the front quarter panel and rear quarter panel. This was the way the car came from the factory. No more. All this has been re-sculptured in fiberglass.

The 46 year old fiberglass of the 68 has had extensive repairs from (1) aging cracks, (2) engine heat deteriorating the hood, (3) an unknown origin 4X6 inch fiberglass corrupted blemish on the driver's door, (4) engine oil fumes saturating the rear valance panel (the panel with the taillights)..the entire valance panel had to be replaced..$$$$.(5) WD-40 saturation problems. I just grossly sprayed chrome parts with WD-40 to prevent corrosion. Overspray allowed WD-40 to seep through micro cracks in the then paint and corrupt the fiberglass. These areas of fiberglass had to be ground out, re-fiberglassed, and then re-contoured.


I'm impressed with their fiberglass guy. He'll splot a ground out damaged area of the body with a fiberglass patch that will look just awful. It has to set. I'll come back later and he will have ground down his fiberglass patch into perfect contours with the original body lines. No body putty.
 
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