Painting begun

After the drilling and mods I started prepping the frame for paint.

This entailed numerous wipedowns with Xylene to clean off all of the mill scale and oil. It also allowed me to find some places where I'd missed welding slag and other sharp edges (OUCH!) and take care of those.

Xylene is nasty stuff. Make sure you're working in a WELL VENTILATED area. I had all of my garage doors open and a fan blowing from behind me towards the open doors the whole time.

I went through several pairs of nitrile gloves, rubber gloves and supposedly "chemical resistant" gloves (they weren't) during this process. I finally found some truly chemical resistant gloves that stood up to the xylene.

I bought a pack of white shop rags to use for this. The process was to soak the rag with xylene and wipe a tube. When the rag got dirty (1-2 passes) I would turn it to a clean side and continue. Once the whole thing was dirty it got tossed into a dedicated trash bag and I started with another clean rag. I went through at least 50 rags doing this and I probably went over the frame 4 times in total before the rags came out clean.

Once the rags showed no more residue I sanded the shinier metal bits to give a bit of tooth for the paint to hold. Looking back I should probably have used a more aggressive paper but I didn't have any. One more wipedown to clean the sanding residue and I was ready to begin.

Let me state for the record that this frame is really well built. It appears to contain somewhere around 17 miles of tubing in total. And I've painted every single mile of it.


Once.

And it needs two coats.

I'm using Hammerite Rust Cap hammered silver paint for the frame. I like the looks of the hammered finish and it hides a lot of imperfections.

It also, as I subsequently found out, requires repainting in either under 4 hours or after 14 days. Since it took me about 10 hours to apply the first coat, I missed that "under 4 hours" window. So now I'm waiting 14 days for the paint to fully cure so I can put on a second coat.

The biggest challenge is to make sure that every side of every tube and every joint is painted. I missed a couple of places initially and had to go back and touch them up later. But I've come up with a more organized approach for the second coat.

I'm going to place a small tape marker on every single tube and bracket. When I get to that part I'll remove the marker and paint all sides of that particular piece. In another week I'll be able to see how that works out.

The other concern (excluding standing on my head painting upside down) is painting the underside of the main 4" round tubes. Those will be painted everywhere but where they're sitting on the jackstands. Once I get the suspension on the car and it's sitting on its wheels, I'll get under it and touch up those 4 spots. They already have one coat of paint on them so the second one will just be added protection and to blend in.

Wish me luck.

My wife suggested that I just go for the powdercoat and deal with the color next time.

Next time?!?!