Matthew Taylor's Journal

1-4-15
The "after New Years" sale on fireworks must have been incredible, and my thrifty neighbors have taken full advantage. Its like the 4th of July - every day! My dogs are as rattled as I am when Jerry looks at my body work. I do drool a bit less though. So, after another intense inspection - all is ok - time to prep the car. A light sanding to expose fresh metal, lots of compressed air - and a final wipe down with "Whip Out" - and I am ready for the "primer class". Another "suggestion" on the primer, we are using "Slick Sand", and a fairly high end version of that. We go over the plan:
Its explained that it is like spray body filler. We are going to put a bunch of it on, and take a bunch of it off. Using the 80 grit sand paper, and the paint sticks we just used on the body filler. So, its kinda the same as what we just spent a month doing...."No", Jerry says, but it sounds like it to me...All along Jerry has been telling me we will use 3 coats - sanding the first one with 80 grit, the second with 180, and the final with 400 wet. I got all that. Now he is talking about hitting the car 3 times right now. With no sanding in between. As lost as a Second Lieutenant with a map and compass, I point out this glaring discrepancy in the plan. Turns out I wasn't paying proper attention - my idea of a "coat" and a painters are not the same thing! We are going to cover the car 3 times for EACH coat. That's 9 times, for those of you as dim as me. But, if my body work doesn't suck too bad, we may only go around twice on the last coat. Have to wait and see...

So, now its Chemistry 101. But without the Bunsen burners this time. The primer is reduced to the desired flow rate. And we decide thick for the first coat. We will reduce it more each time, so the final is about 20%. Then the science of hardener vs temp/humidity comes to play. It seams as exacting as a politicians moral compass. Kinda like the harder in the body filler. Primer is mixed, and the clock is ticking.

Jerry and I had made a dry-run rehearsal, so we both knew what was coming. He would shoot the first pass, I would shoot the second, and he was going to "clean up" on the 3rd. The only part we didn't practice was that he was going to do his "Drill Instructor SGT Simpson" impersonation over my shoulder during the second pass. It felt like I was home...on Parris Island again. His instruction was easy to follow: "FASTER!!!....SLOWER!!!....FEATHER!!!....MORE TRIGGER!!!....". I expected to get the command "MOUNTAIN CLIMBERS TILL YOU DIE - GO!", but it never came. Instead we had a debrief on what went well, and what I needed to work on - there were 6 more passes to go - and then color and clear coat. Jerry said he wasn't yelling, just talking loud enough to be heard over the compressor - but he never did explain the "bony maggot" reference...

Last step was the paint gun clean up. Turns out, if you ask a bunch of dumb questions, and that delays cleaning out the gun, the primer will harden in the gun. I got the bonus class on how to break the gun all the way down and clean it. I didn't bring it up, but, I kinda wanted to grab a stop watch and blindfold, and have Jerry put it back together.