Quote:
Originally posted by Matt Smith
I have painted classic cars professionally for a few years while on a working holiday in London. Plus lots of my own cars beforehand.
We did some pretty cool stuff: Aston DB6's, 356, E Types, Austin Healeys, MG T's etc. I loved doing this work, and loved doing it right.
You do need to strip them colmpletely in my opinion. I have never painted a car that wasn't bare metalled, even when the customer insisted we do a "quick blow over" (no such thing, ever!).
My point is that while these cars look awesome, they seem to loose a bit of their magic, especially if they had a couple of scars on them. The scars told a story, and with these sorts of sports cars the story inevitably was an interesting one.
Maybe a bit of it was I now knew who had painted the car: me. Nothing magical about that (unless I have been deluding myself).
Now I really treasure original paint. Problem is, not many people do. In fact I have yet to meet anyone who appreciates the cool swagger of my sun baked suede silver 911 quite as I do. I get nagged to repaint it (which I could easily do, and probably will) all the time. But there's just something about climbing into a car that you know has lived mysteriously somewhere else. How did that scratch get there? Why is there a little scrape on the fender? I dunno. That's half the fun to me I guess.
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Matt: Spoken like a true purist! Bravo!
-Zoltan.
PS: Before my time, the front driver side of my car took a hit, and was repainted. It is a pretty decent fix, but you can see a slight shade difference. So, even though I feel a repaint lowers the value of a car, it didn't stop me from buying my baby!