[owdlvr]

Last April I decided my '69 needed a paint job. I turned part of my garage into a spray booth and completed the job with a Princess Auto touch-up paint gun. If I had scheduled an extra day for practice, it would have come out better...but I wasn't looking for a show shine. A 10/20 was going to be fine as far as I was concerned. Keep in mind that all of this, from driving into the garage and then driving out, was done in 4 days.

Post copied over from another site:

A couple of weekends ago I started to attack the rusty sections on the '69. It's mostly all stone-chips or similar, but it definitely needed attention. Even with a spectrometer I couldn't get the paint matched correctly...so what do you do?

Somehow I got it into my head that my buddies and I could strip, prep, paint and reassemble the car over the Easter weekend.

...in my garage. Yeah, I've lost it. But really, I couldn't show up to the Spring Thaw with "patches" the '69 beetle! I've painted portions of one car in my life, and it turned out quite well (had we ever gone back to wetsand out the orange peel). So with some luck, this will work out alright. The paint, currently, is a 20/20 paint job (at 20 feet or 20mph it looks great), or perhaps 30/30 with the rust now. If I can get a 10/10 or 20/20...and know the rust has been stopped...I'll be happy.

5:20pm, I pulled the car into the garage:


12:00am, with a long stop for dinner at a friend's place:




And now for the photos of things we discovered along the way...


I can say I never thought the rear windows / feet method would really work. I have pop-outs waiting, so broken glass here wasn't a problem. Amazed at how easy it was!


Broke the windshield, lower left hand corner. Damnit! not in the budget!


Gutted the doors, 1-piece windows going back in. No time to chase down vent-window doors.


Thankfully I didn't break the rear glass!


The worst surprise removing the front fenders had for us.



The front apron, however, is bad. It's been in an accident, repaired with cheap repair panels and bondo. I totally forgot to order a repair panel for this, so my buddies Scott and Ian have been working out the best way to patch it up with good steel.


Left rear quarter...I expected much worse.


Worst part of the Right Rear Quarter.


Aluminum tape, painted over. Awww crap. What is this hiding?


Scott and Ian's progress on the front Apron before we called it a night.

-Dave