TY. You have seen the picture before, plenty good enough, and it held its own; even so, the finish wasn’t at its full potential, just enough to get through last year’s cruise season.
When I pull it out this year, I’m going to sandbag, claiming that I didn’t do a f/ing thing to it, and it must be their imaginations. Most likely, I’ll get an earful of bfs, so we’ll see how that one goes.
I don’t want to piece meal it, so I’ll post a series of pictures when it’s finished.
Thanks. The driveway picture and this picture were before I re-sanded the paint. On a micro-level: under artificial light, I can see a huge difference, but if it’s in natural light, I cannot tell whether or not there is a difference.
The before-after problem could be based in the “genetic deal,” whereby the rods and cones in the eyes start to go to hell as the years pile up. It has to do with the way light enters the eyes, not how well they focus. Whatever! The point is that compared to my younger years, sometimes I feel like I’m blind as a f/ing bat.
As a kid, I never had to trace. What do you mean you “cannot see what area hasn’t been sanded? Are you blind?” Now, it’s impossible to work without trace. My hands, not eyes, made the car look as it does. So when the fine tuning exceeds tactical sensory, I cannot “see” whether or not the car looks different. After all, it looked good enough for me last year, the reason I shipped it.
For my own courisioty, I want to stage the car in similar before-after photos. Then again, I never could get a decent picture of the car last year, so I don’t see why this year will be different. Even if I cannot see a difference, I’ll post before-after because everyone loves car porn!
The first picture is before and the second is after. The bigger before-after impact is at nighttime. Before, it was somewhat dead and muddy. I thought it was the ‘earth-tone’ pigment because Obnoxious Orange is a muddy color. Now, reflected light throws out super-sharp highlights, actually able to capture the highlight reflection on your hand, just like it would come from a mirror. Very-berry pleased with that.
A thing called a job seems to always be getting in the way, so it limits photo-session time. I took some pictures today, and I’m going to chit-can them. If life deals lemons, you might as well make lemonade. So before I chit-can them, notice how well the highlights reflect the hazy overcast.
It explodes more in real time than in photos, and the gawk factor in traffic is something else. I haven’t been out enough this year, but three times last year in traffic, people sitting in other cars asked if I have been saved. I’ve been driving the car since 11/5/86, and it was a fairly respectable looking car. (Actually it was smoking hot for the first 10 years, before the crimson, pearl-like huge died from UV exposure.) Never once during that time did anyone pull alongside and ask if I have been saved! I’m pretty good putting on another set of shoes and looking from another side. And I can see where it looks like a fireball straight from hell!
Naturally, the weather has been absolutely lovely. Got rained out on last Friday’s cruise night, so I never got a chance to get out, and I got rained-on Saturday night.
Here’s another before-shot fireball photo, and one of these years, I’ll get some after-shot fireball photos. Meanwhile, here are a couple of low-light shots in the garage.
I guess that I’m better at working on cars than taking pictures. The frustrating thing is that it taking pictures looks easy. Perhaps the difficulty is the image I’m trying to capture because I can take a bunch of pictures that looks like everyone else’s pictures.
I was over at mh daughter/sil’s house, my parent’s former house. Sil had a buddy who was at the oc cruise, and told him to be on the lookout for my car. The guy said he saw it and reported back that it didn’t have much shine to it. Sil told him that he must not have seen it because it stands out in the crowd lamf. I saw the car mistaken for mine, a 69 Camaro, a dull, washboard pofs; the guy took one at mine and did everything in his power to stay far away as possible.
Sil said that he wanted to shoot his buddy some pictures, so I shot a few myself.
Thanks for the comps. I call it Obnoxious Orange, but it’s often called Carousel Red on a Pontiac and Hugger Orange on a Chevy. The shared name is ’69 GM paint code #72.
I was parked offset to a ’69 Nova claimed to be painted in #72 Hugger Orange, but it wasn’t correct, not enough “blood,” and it was pretty washed out. In fact, it was so washed out that I didn’t “see it” as #72 until I overheard the guy talking about it being Hugger Orange, code #72.
Mine is a spot-on match, documented by spot testing on assorted factory color palettes on the car. The ‘other’ #72 was high dollar PPG, and it was pulled from the paint code. I was in the collision industry for 17 years, and it was my experience that GM-dealer body shops never trusted GM’s paint codes, EVER! Instead, they computer matched the color, or used some other formula/reference for the correct color paint. Occasionally, I have thought about mentioning this when people reference paint codes, but you can’t argue with an expert who knows his numbers, so I stay out of it. Hell, I can’t even add, so I don’t stand a chance!
In all fairness, if internal GM cannot figure out its own colors, how the hell is PPG supposed to figure it out? In hindsight, I have seen lots of correct #72, so there isn’t a shortage of it on the market, and someone is selling the correct color. But I have also seen many cars painted with this washed-out color. How many of these owners ‘think’ this washed-out orange is correct #72. Perhaps it would be a good project to start asking the owners of these washed-out cars what color is their paint.
Anyway, you know how it goes; at least that’s how it goes on my local cruise lots. After I told the guy that my car was also done in #72, multiple people were becoming involved. One looks, another one becomes interested, and hollers out to another to join in. To top it off, people walking by also get into it, and the next thing you know, you have 15 guys gathered around comparing notes. And the guy actually started defending that his was the correct #72 because PPG wouldn’t be selling the wrong color paint.
His car wasn’t a born-#72, so I showed him the code plate; then, he looked at the rockers below the moldings, at the color line between factory paint and new paint. The color match is so spot-on, it’s ridiculous. Once he verified mine was the correct color, he was pretty upset. Looking at his washed-out paint, I understood why, and I felt sorry for him.
I don’t have any decent shots of the car this year, and I don’t consider the ones I just posted as decent. But I’ll post some from last year. It’s the best I can do for now, and if I posted any more, it would become redundant because it’s the sos, different angles.
I know a professional photographer who does high-end, professional digital photographic work. Perhaps she can capture what I obviously cannot because the paint looks more like metal than paint, as I suspected it would. The photographer doesn’t have any car pictures and sees it as a chance to diversify her subject matter. If I let her use the pictures in her portfolio, giving her exclusive rights, including selling for profit, she will do a detailed photo shoot for free, and give me all the high resolution copies. I will be free to use them however I wish as long as she gets credit as the photographer. You know how it goes; let a professional do it when it’s obvious that you cannot do the job.
This set shows the hammered in Franken-hack, and I wanted it close enough so that it can be referenced to the finished quarter shots in the above posting. I call it ‘hammered in’ because it took a hell of a lot of hammer work to register the metal.
I did it with a splatter welder, seen in the background. I chose the splice-area to maintain the original-quarter-panel look from the trunk, resulting in a very stealth repair. I share with some, but not with everyone. Someone who saw the car before the repair looked at it. Rather than sharing, as I do with many, when he started looking the car over, I kept it zipped, but I was polite enough to repeat “yep” every time he said, “You did this in your garage?”
When he recalled/realized the quarter area had been repaired, he studied it closely, inside the trunk, wheel house, and inside of the door jamb. He also asked if he could tap it lightly; I said sure. Yep! 100% solid metal, tip to toe. After studying it for about 10 minutes, unable to determine what had been done, he asked how I repair it, and I said “With a hammer.” End of conversation.
The last two shots show differences during blocking, with the last picture further down the road. In the last picture, notice how deep the existing red oxide was cut, much deeper than in the earlier prime-block session. The way most people block, it would be physically impossible to have removed the red oxide, and the result is what I call ‘classic car droop.’ Perhaps, I’ll explain why someday, but I don’t feel like doing a blocking 101 at this time. For now, I’ll say that it makes all the difference in the world because everything you see on my car is the result of blocking, nothing to do with paint.
These shots show what a truly miserable workspace I have; substandard lighting, inadequate space, and working with whatever junk I can fish from the trash can, my specialty by default. The filter-wall was made from office building HVAC filters, goose tape, and cardboard. I spent 3 years fishing out the premium filters from the more dirty ones, and you can see that I had to settle for what I could get; thus, the darker/dirtier filters. I knew it would slow down a high volume of trash, but I had no idea that it would work so well because I had zero trash in the paint. Also, notice the high tech air hose plumbing. By the time I got to final paint, I had learned that it would be impossible to manipulate a hose around the car, so I had a hose on each side and swapped air hoses when I went from side to side.
I had groups of 5 photos to match text. See wtf happens when I try to dink around with numbers? Anyway, this is the last of the 20 photos I selected for this post.
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