The car is blocked out, ready for the white sealer.





Do these tires make my rear end look big?





Here's the sealer painted. Even though I am using the 3M PPS on the paint gun, it was still a bit tight last time in painting the rocker panels. So we raised the car even higher in the air, and made use of some walk boards to get to all of the roof. Painted the roof first, and then moved the walk boards and finished the car.








I took these last two pictures as teaser shots for Brad (the owner). He had talked about painting the roof white, but this is as close as it gets. The Viper red is just too bright to have a white roof also.











One more dose of wet sanding and it should be ready for red paint.











Just to back up and offer some explaination here, I normally use a white sealer under the Viper red just to give it some more punch. The downside to this is if you were to get any dust nibs in the white that may not get noticed until after the red goes on, when the imperfections get buffed out you have a good chance of little white specs showing up in the bright red paint as the red gets rubbed off the white painted dust nib. This is why I usually do separate processes, wet sanding the white in between painting the red. One thing I noticed while spraying the white sealer was that it is a pain to get inside and paint the dashboard with the roll cage in the way. It was also a pain to get the underside of the rockers sprayed (let's use some jackstands) which made it fun to get to the roof (and now walkboards). Now all of this was fine for a sealer coat that was getting wetsanded anyhow, but I could just see me dragging an air hose across the door sill or opening at the quarter while trying to climb inside to paint the dash. Likewise, using walkboards on final paint, and having to move them between coats, was just an invitation for more debris in the paint. The early Fairlanes were known for having a chrome divider along the bottom of the sail panel, so I thought to use this as my saving grace, a break point to divide the paint job up into separate sprays. (like I need to drag this along further.... ) But in the interest of a better job, that's what we'll do. Here's the masking for painting the roof, dash, and front cowl. The car was placed back on the ground for easier access to the roof. Once the red has set up, we'll mask those areas, revert back to jack stands for access to the lower rockers, and spray again. Fun, fun.


White sealer wet sanded and masked:








Basecoat:








Cleared: