60Patrol

Looking great mate, well done!

Nice work!!!!
Hope you can post your finished work

I moved the brake booster posts to a separate thread. Here is the link: http://www.60patrol.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3928&start=15

It's hard to believe my last update on my own thread was 3 years ago.... hopefully I can bring it current again.

After a long hiatus of sitting in my driveway, with the occasional driving, I finally started working on the body. The PO went over the Patrol with rattle cans at some point, which was flaking off in most places and there were a number of rusted out holes. Overall, the body was in decent shape, with the majority of the rust limited to the corners and low points where water collects - no major dents or other problems.

I've always thought it'd be interesting to paint my own vehicle, and I figured I couldn't make matters much worse by learning on my Patrol. I also didn't expect Pebble Beach Concours - level finish - enough to look good from a few steps back was good enough. I knew nothing of automotive painting, including any and all prep work, so I really had no idea what I was getting into.

I started with a basic DA sander and 80 grit sandpaper (my son lasted about 10 mins before getting bored...):



Somewhere in there, I realized that I needed to take all the panels off to really get to a lot of the rust. I finished the tub after going through about fifty 80 grit pads:

Next step was to get the first coat of paint on to seal the metal back up. I ended up going with Southern Polyurethanes for all my paints except for the color/base coat - mostly because of the online support and the excellent phone support.

I rolled the Patrol out into the garage one morning and, with my first attempt at using an HVLP gun, I nervously sprayed on two coats of epoxy primer. I look back later on myself and laugh, now knowing I had no reason to fear screwing up as much as I thought I did... Anyway, I made it through with only one paint run.

Excellent!

Certainly your updates have been missed! Your work with the paint will be interesting to follow, so please keep the pictures coming.

And talking about pictures, in the one showing part of the front-left without the fender, we can see a nice adaptation of a power booster. Please post some additional details and parts used.

I parked the frame/tub to the side and started working on the other panels/doors/hood, but finally wised up to trying to find something other than DA sanding for stripping paint to bare metal. I settled on strip disc's - more expensive but far, far faster in stripping paint. In retrospect, I should have just taken everything to the sandblasters.... oh well... lesson learned.

The tub, still connected to the frame, was easy to roll around and paint. The other panels needed to be painted on all sides, so I had to figure out a way to do it in my driveway... and so my ghetto paint stand was created.



Note the much heavier pitting and spots of rust - especially on the tops of the front quarter panels, which had sagged over time, and presumably water pooled up there. So... I fixed this by welding in a piece of channel steel under both sides after they were painted:

Esteban wrote:And talking about pictures, in the one showing part of the front-left without the fender, we can see a nice adaptation of a power booster. Please post some additional details and parts used.

Oh - I was the original poster in the Brake Booster thread - it was just moved out into its own thread for better visibility!

So after all the panels had a coat of epoxy primer on them (Southern Polyurethanes is very specific that the paint goes on bare metal, and then filler), I started body work. Now.... I realize that a purist will use a dolly and hammer and spend days/weeks/months smoothing out the metal until it's perfect. However, I'm a realist, and I was ok with bondo repairs, and so just limited myself to 1/16" of bondo or less. I ended up using Rage Extreme - about 2 gallons of it, and I probably sanded off 1.9g of that...





What I didn't realize until later (until after all the filler was done) was that there's a reason I was recommended the high build primer when I bought my paint... I sanded the bondo until it was almost glass smooth, not realizing that the primer is designed for the last few microns of smoothing things out. Good news is that I saved myself about 3/4gallon of primer. Bad news is that I spent months doing fine block sanding that I didn't need to.... another lesson learned...

Anyway, after all the filler was done, I sprayed on another coat of epoxy primer to seal the exposed metal, and then a couple coats of primer:

At this point, I realize that my "good enough" paint job has become more exacting than originally I set out for it, and that I was more impressed with my first paint job than I had expected of myself. Not perfect, but better than my low expectations.

Anyway, at some point I had to figure out what I was going to do with my hard top and rear doors. The hard top was in terrible shape - it was rusty, had holes, and was more bondo than metal in many places. And the rear doors were almost beyond repair - the bottom of both doors were completely rusted out from water collecting there, and one had tons of bondo filling the holes from the PO:





So... I explored options, and found that rrodriguezsal here on the boards offered a soft top frame, soft top production, and rear doors, all for a very reasonable price shipped from Bogota. I always liked the idea of a soft top anyway, so I ordered everything. It was a pleasure working with Raul, and I'd recommend his work to anyone on here.

I assembled and test fit the rear canopy on mid-progress:







And the canopy at one point:



Excellent fit and finish. Rear doors were a perfect replacement too (just set in place... no hinges here):