Does anyone galvanize the chassis before paint?

[Tremelune]

I was ruminating about a future project, a ground-up build from a bare chassis, and I was thinking about what chassis to start with. Because all of them would require extensive metalwork, paint, and a new motor, I would probably just buy the cheapest air-cooled chassis I could find, which would likely be a beat up '76-77 (my thought being that earlier chassis are exempt from California smog testing and the SC tends to go for more).

That got me to thinking about when these chassis started to be galvanized from the factory. That got me to thinking about bare-metal paint jobs that remove the undercoating and everything on the 80s cars.

Am I correct that when people take cars down to bare metal to be repainted, the zinc gets stripped off? I rarely see these cars being dipped and plated, so I assume they're just sanded/blasted to steel, then primered. Does this mean that even a top-notch paint job has less rust protection than an example with factory original paint? If this is the case, why don't more people sand down to primer and not all the way to metal?

Anyway. Most of this moot, as any car I painted would be parked indoors and never driven on corrosive roads, but I just got to thinkin'...

[962porsche]

often when a car is stripped to bare you want to use a epoxy or etch primer . this replaces the galvanized coating from the manufacture .
the galvanized zinc coating is not in any way a high mil thickness . the big plus to it is the dipping of the chassis to get the galvanized coating between the seams .

does the epoxy or etch do as good of a job ? yes it does !
as for dipping a car to strip them i personally do not like it . you have to put a lot of trust in the place you send the car to for the dip striping and re rust coating .

[Tremelune]

Aha, so epoxy primer is the answer. Good stuff.

Somewhat unrelated question, is there a good epoxy primer that I can brush on in small quantities? Every now and then I see a rusty spot, or most recently a bare steel spot that was rubbed clean from previous too-large tires. I don't want to burn a pint of 2-part epoxy for each little touch-up job, but the rust does bug me.

[962porsche]

you can mix up small amounts and brush or roll or even use a mini gun and spray the epoxy primer on .
the thing is if your tires a rubbing the finish off it's really pointless as the tires will just rub the primer off . as long as the tires are rubbing you will alway have clean rubbed polished metal that will not rust as long as it's getting rubbed off .