In the shop alone today and finished lettering this sign and needed to mix a color for shading some letters. As I normally would, I started with a can close to the background color and added a small amount of my lettering color. It started going real muddy, so I added some chrome yellow to brighten it a bit. Then when it turned to goose poop I added a tad of orange to try to swing it to where I wanted. Son I had the nearly filled can of a horrid shade and poured a tad of it into an new can and added some white and soon had a half full can of another bogus color and decided to start from ground zero. Mixed what I wanted easily, but laughed remembering when I used to end up with all these weird colors and would mix them together when the mixing bench got too loaded and would then try to sell that color as a background to realtors.
Posted by Si Allen (Member # 420) on :
Lol!
Been there and done that!
Mixed them all together and used it to coat the back of panels so that they wouldn't curl.
Posted by Curt Stenz (Member # 82) on :
I used to do work in a truck paint shop and they mixed a lot of automotive paint, gallons and gallons a week. When someone would off mix a gallon or two... "go get the hardener". Stir in some hardener, let it cure and dump it in the dumpster! Was an internal joke that the owner never caught on to.
Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :
1960s......my friend had a 55 pontiac 4 door. and he was freinds with the guy that ran the body shop at the pontiac dealership. we went there one sat morning and johnny(bodyshop guy)was cleaning out up. ron(the guy owned the 55, asked if he coud have some ofthe paint that was sittin on the shelves(leftovers from many paint jobs)so johnny gave us a big box of paint)))) now couple 17 yr old kids with a whole bunch a paint and an old beater car........yep we decided to paint the car. 1st we sorted the enamel paints from the lacquer. we knew the 2 didnt mix.....but we could mix enough of each to paint the car)))) we got some fugly gray green in the enamels and proceesed to get a couple rollers and painted the roof and the bottom below the side chrome strip. then we went for a ride...........to help DRY THE PAINT))))))
Posted by Dave Grundy (Member # 103) on :
Brings back memories Joe!! Thanks for the memories.
Had two friends who had older cars back in the early 60's. Both decided they needed to repaint their cars on the same weekend.
One used a roller and the other used a borrowed compressor and spray gun.
The guy who used the roller did a fine job...the spray gun guy ended up with a car that had lace curtain runs all down the sides.
Posted by Dale Feicke (Member # 767) on :
Had a buddy whose dad gave him the old family car, a '51 Chevy 4 door. It had a decent body; but the paint was pretty faded and bleached out.
He decided to give it a spray can paint job. I swear this is true. He masked off the chrome stuff with paper towels and Scotch tape. He'd never done any body/paint work before, but had sprayed some shutters for the house at one time; so this shouldn't be a big deal.....
He then went to the local hardware and bought all the ACE baby blue they had, and started painting...out in the yard. About 2/3 of the way through the job, he ran out of paint. Back to the hardware; but they didn't have anymore. Of course, while he was doing all this running, the bugs and dirt had settled in and added a little "texture" to the finish.
So he had to go to a nearby town, to a different hardware, and bought more; but it was Perry & Derrick this time, and when he started spraying, it came out a slightly different shade, fairly noticeable.
This process took two days, over a weekend; and in the meantime, the paint had soaked through the paper towels (and dried, and stuck to all the masked areas...chrome, glass, rubber, etc.) and the heat from the sun had softened up the glue on the scotch tape. He had one HE-- of a mess. Took weeks of carefully wiping off the chrome with paint thinner to get the torn up towels and tape goo off. And of course, every place the thinner ran down a door or something, it left a streak in that fresh paint. Good lord, what a catastrophe! Multi-colored, streaked, and smeared....I thought his dad was going to kill him; but he just said, "You messed it up....you drive it!"
And this, my friends, is the vehicle that I had to ride back and forth to high school in......for over a year.
[ August 09, 2015, 09:32 AM: Message edited by: Dale Feicke ]
Posted by Curt Stenz (Member # 82) on :
Speaking of old school auto body painting does anyone remember the technique of painting lace?
You would go to the sewing store and buy some yardage of lace, like your mother would sew on a dress. Then mask off geometric shape panels on your hood or trunk lid or wherever. Next shoot a base coat then immediately carefully lay and tape down onto the wet paint an oversize piece of lace (mask), then shoot a contrasting color of paint on the panel with the lace. Wait a few minuets and slowly peel up the painted-over lace and you had the most interesting lace pattern. The choice of colors was critical. This was popular in the late 1960's.
Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :
i took my moms....DOLIES......women used to crohchet them hehehehehehehe
Posted by Dale Feicke (Member # 767) on :
Those days were the hey-day of wild paint, Curt.
I had a 450 Honda Scrambler, that I did a lace job on.....it was painted kindof a metallic avocado green, with gold lace. It must've been attractive to somebody....it got stolen, and we never found a trace of it.
I did a guitar for a friend....painted it candy-apple red and did black lace on it. That one really came out beautiful.
Remember also, the "cobwebbing"? You'd set the gun pressure way down, and shoot a fine stream of paint all over.
How about the "smoke"? Set an acetylene torch to just acetylene, where it has all the black smoke, and let it drift onto the paint, then clear it?
Lots of cool effects, that are long-gone (some of them, it's probably for the best).
As neat as many of these paint tricks were, seems that few have survived over time. Most of them were done with acrylic lacquers, that required many coats of paint, followed with many coats of clear, over it all. Most of these vehicles, that were actually street-driven or regularly used out in the sunlight, wound up cracked and/or peeling, in a couple of years.
[ August 09, 2015, 09:37 AM: Message edited by: Dale Feicke ]
Posted by old paint (Member # 549) on :
we painted our snow skis with lace. they looked like snake skin. we mixed up all the oddball leftover paint and painted our homebuilt utility trailer
Posted by Don Hulsey (Member # 128) on :
I put black lace on my girlfriends yellow '69 Corvair in '71. Must not have been too bad. She married me in '73 and we are still together.
But my favorite of all time was the first ever full wrap that I saw. After getting married we moved to Florida. and I worked with a guy that had a '64 Dodge Coronet completely wrapped in a floral print contact paper(the kind people used to line drawers back then.
Posted by Bill Modzel (Member # 22) on :
I still have a small suitcase full of lace that I can't part with. One other technique I used was to lay down my base color blend than drizzle rubber cement around, let it dry than spray what would be my main color, rub the rubber cement off. It was a nice squiggle paint mask.
