Finishing my trunk

This is what my trunk looked like before. It started rusting after some tosser left it outside in the rain overnight with the cover on and put it in the trunk before I came to pick it up. I was not impressed...

And before the rest of the story, this is the finished result. I am quite pleased with the improvement but I'm still gonna put one more layer of clear coat on it. I'll explain why.

I bought a can of Eastwood Rust Encapsulator and a can of Trunk Paint. I thought the trunk paint would be black/grey with white splatters but it apparently is ONLY black and white splatters...

So this is what it looks like up close.

This is from a bit further away.

I had a few spots with the old black paint on it which now is visible. It's not too bad though. So just a clear coat and it will be finished.

Removing rust and more (unfinished) painting

On a 40 year old car there's always some rust, especially if some of the previous owners did a bad paint job. Here are some of the results:

Several rust spots on the back pass. side fender:

A crack in the paint left of the trunk-lid:

Rust along the edge of the trunk-lid.

Not very cool and it only gets worse so lets just get some paint on there before it gets too bad. I know I can never get the same colour so I just used the closest match which is the paint I also used on the front bumper. One day this car will be repainted anyway. It can be a sleeper until then ;-)

I found this cool blue flexible tape and I just taped away...

Then I put newspaper around the spots to be painted:

Just in time I discovered this new sanding-disc from 3M. Awesome! This would have cost me an hour of sanding with normal sandpaper. Now it only took 10 minutes:

Then I put on more anti-rust primer. This one will actually stop existing rust as well. But I sanded away every bit I could find.

BAD SURPRISE! When I removed the blue tape, it tore away loads of paint. I was not happy!

I decided to remove all the blue tape before continuing and tape with normal painter's tape instead.

Then I started spraying the first white coats:

These spots too a bit longer because I kept sanding off too much... But eventually I put on white here as well ;-)

Nice!

The colour difference is quite significant unfortunately. I guess the car will have a few white spots the coming years...

I taped off the bottom black decal stripe and put a few layers across the full width of the trunk so you don't notice the colour difference on the trunk at all:

It's a good solid layer of paint everywhere. Now the edges need to be sanded away still. And maybe a few layers of clear varnish.

But I think I'm going to start with removing the LPG first soon...

Painting the front bumper

So finally, I had time to paint! In the previous post I showed the bits I sanded. The next step is to wrap your car in paper or plastic, whatever has your preference. I used newspaper and it proved to be fine.

Wrapping the car up like this took me a few hours. You have to make sure the paper (or tape) doesn't touch any painted areas which was a little tricky because I actually had paper behind the sides of the bumper.

The person(s) who previously painted this car did a shit job on wrapping their car, there is residue everywhere. Take your time and make sure every little gap is closed.

Also make sure that the tape is stuck on really well where it's going to touch wet paint so the paint doesn't crawl underneath!

From the left...

From the right.


When the car is wrapped up nice and tight, get your de-greaser. I had actually washed my bumper with soap already before I started wrapping and now I cleaned the remaining grease and other fatty crap (if any!).

I used this:

Just before painting I removed any dust with a sticky cloth just to make sure there was no dust on the surface anywhere:

Then I got my plastic primer (since it's a rubber bumper instead of metal!) and shook the can for 2-3 minutes.

It's VERY important to shake your cans, wether it's primer or paint!

The primer dried within minutes so I hardly had time to shake my can with white paint. I would like to point out again that it is very important you shake your can well for 2-3 minutes!

When applying paint, do not rush and better spray less than more. Take your time. It's very easy to get drip-lines. If you are uncertain of how to spray-paint, try it out on a piece of cardboard to become familiar with the spraying distance and speed.

One layer of paint.

Six layers of paint.

About 9-10 layers of paint and we're done.

Not...

So, that's what I thought but my sanding was wrong... Not happy but what did I know. The problem was that the "feathers" on the side of the sanded spots were not long enough. Because of this and the original layer of paint and primer being quite thick, the sanded spots showed as holes, if that makes sense? When looking over the bumper, without much effort you could see where the spots had been, or actually still were. They became "dented" areas. I didn't get this far to end up with a shitty paint job so a few days later I got my sander from home and bought 180-240 paper for it. This time I made sure the feathering on the sides was a lot bigger so that the sanded areas would be much less visible.

Bigger feathers = smoother sanded aeas.

Since there were a few days in between, I degreased again and after that I used the sticky cloth again to remove any dust. Then I applied enough layers of paint on the sanded areas only and then a few layers on the whole bumper.

The result was a hell of a lot better than before. Big lesson learned!

It was dark when I finished and I also wanted to apply a clear coat or two which I didn't have so I left it there.

When I had more time and the clear varnish I only dusted with the sticky cloth since there was no grease and then I applied two layers of the clear varnish. It makes the bumper a bit shinier.

It dried real quick so after a short while I carefully removed the paper and tape.

And here is one really lovely first paint-job that I am quite proud of:

Not bad eh?