Progress!

Well the Galaxie was for the briefest time all one color, here's how it went down.

I have pretty much got to the end of the sanding and under Gene's watchful eye decided to spray the whole car with the expensive (ouch) primer. So after a long tedious trip around with masking tape and newspaper she was almost ready. A quick wipe over with a rag (having checked to make sure it wasn't a pair of Gene's old pants, I still don't know why he does that) followed by a more serious wipe with a tack cloth and we were set.

I parked that car under a shade tree to keep the sun off and we mixed up the primer. Up until now we have been using some old stuff that Gene has about 50 gallons of. This we throw into the spray gun and shoot. However this stuff is the real deal and requires thinning and mixing with hardener and so on. Well about half of the car was well shaded so I started on the right side and really did not make too shabby a job of it.

Then the sun came out and the roof and left side got too hot. So whilst we waited for the sun to move over the tree again we decided to go visit a friend, forgetting about the paint in the gun. Now the old primer you can leave in the gun forever but remember I said that the new primer we added hardener? Well you get my drift, when we returned the primer had turned to jelly in the gun and we were royal screwed. Hours later I got the gun cleaned out and with the pot full of thinners was desperately trying to remove the last of the jelly from the nozzle. Just when I thought that the gun was toast it spluttered and farted and blew a chunk of snot out followed by clear thinner. We had just enough primer to finish albeit that Gene (who hates to waste a penny) complained bitterly for the rest of the day about the primer that we tossed out. Such is life at the body shop. Once the primer was on I was able to once again check out my sanding and joy of joys there are not too many faults and those are going to be easy to fill and buff out. At this point Gene decided that it might be fun to spray some lacquer paint over the areas that we had particularly worked on so see what they would look like under gloss. Once again I have to say that the quality of our sanding and filling was pretty damned good. Even the big areas behind the driver's door and the front fender where we welded in a patch to remove the fender mirror came out real well. So we have some ares that need a touch more work and the the entire car needs to be blocked but all in all a very productive (and tiring) day.

PS I almost forgot in celebration I took her out on the lane again. This time just for fun I lit her up and left a most satisfying trail of rubber and smoke behind me. Happy days