Some Assembly Required – A Tale of Two Paints

I apologize if the cute title brings back PTSD for those of us that had to labor through A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens when in school. But a do have two anecdotes regarding the paint on my 1963 Jaguar FHC restoration project.

Tale Number One- I had reached the point where I needed to refurbish and assemble the components for the classic covered headlights that came with these cars. One of the parts are the headlight buckets, known affectionately as the “sugar scoops”, based on their unique shape. These lie under the glass covers for the headlights and are notorious for collecting debris right before you drive out on the show field!

In my case, the original buckets came in the boxes of parts that came with my car. They certainly weren’t in great condition paint wise but on the underside where they had not been exposed to sunlight, the paint condition looked pretty good. For the top sides, which are visible to all including concours judges, I knew I needed to media blast them back to bare metal and paint them. In my shop, I have an amazing collection of “rattle can” paints and I pulled about 8 off the shelf that based on their names, might be suitable. BTW, the Series 1 judging guide describes the paint as “The color varies from light to medium silver/gray with a slight metallic finish.” This certainly leaves room for judgement but there was no doubt that my original paint fell within this criterion.

I proceeded to spray out test samples of all the paints I had. Most were either in the silver family or the grey family. And none of them matched! I then did an internet search and found some limited suggestions for rattle can paints that might work. I went to several local auto parts stores and could not find anything that really matched. I then called my automotive paint supplier and asked him if he could match it. Interestingly, he said that his easy method, which used a paint analyzer, could only be used on a flat painted surface. These buckets are not flat. And I could tell he really didn’t want to deal with it, for the sale of a pint of paint. But he did say that I might try my own “mixology” using enamel based paints.

To jump ahead, I used Rustoleum enamel paint to come up with a mix. My best match had 5 parts aluminum/silver, 3 parts green, 2 parts black, and 1 part blue. Once I got my mix perfected, I scaled it up to mix 4 ounces or so and sprayed it onto the topside of the buckets. I was pleased with my results.

Tale Number Two- As I have discussed in several articles previously, the car has been painted Opalescent Golden Sand using a Glasurit Basecoat/Clearcoat system. Also as discussed, I had taken the paint through a complete cycle of wet sanding to remove orange peel and finish sanding in 1200/2000/3000 and polishing using a Rupes random orbital polisher. The paint looks really good in the direct sunlight but I have been a little let down by its appearance in indoor lighting. Now granted, most indoor lighting kind of sucks from a standpoint of making paint look its best but still, there are times when you want to show off your car and indoor lighting is all you’ve got.

I had recently joined some friends for beers and one of them arrived in a Porsche 911 whose paint job looked really amazing. I asked him about it and he said he had “a guy” who did the work to make his average paint look great. I got his contact info and a few weeks ago, Brandon showed up to see what he could do. He did some test panels and seemed satisfied that he could do some good. Brandon cleaned every panel and went over the paint with a clay bar. Then he went after the paint with his Rupes polisher. He went over the entire car with 3 levels of liquid compounds, working small areas at a time. We agreed ahead of time that he could/should stay away from the edges, which is where the most danger of cutting through lies. And when he was done, 12 billable hours later, the car looked amazing! In retrospect, I think what Brandon brought to the table that I couldn’t was his thousands of hours of experience in knowing just how hard to push it without courting the disaster of a cut through of the clearcoat. Actually, he works mainly on new cars, which generally have much less clearcoat thickness than my car has. Regardless, I know that I have always been pretty tentative in my polishing efforts, as I just did not want to have to go back to the paint booth, which I was thoroughly sick of. So “my guy” is Brandon Woo at Liquid Finish Detailing in Apex, NC. I couldn’t be happier.