Vintage Alfa paint correction and my humble opinion

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Rastaral39

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Hey everyone, so it seems like my specialty has evolved into vintage exotics with challenging resprays or otherwise unknown paint jobs.

Much more interesting (to me at least) than your standard late model bccc paint system in that it teaches one how to really "read paint" and develop an approach on how to fix the myriad of issues associated with it i.e.

Varying thickness', partial resprays, bad bodywork etc. the need for combinations of wet sanding if needed, various pads, polishes, compounds. It is my personal belief that it requires a different skill set beyond that of a typical late model car where one can prettty much have an educated guess on what to do to remove defects if one has some experience with it.

I am fortunate to have this client who buys, sells and trades these vintage cars like baseball cards, in that I have gained tons of experience dealing with these " problem " cars. In the last 3 years I have done by conservative estimate around 100 of them.

He has a dealer license so as I said there are a lot of them. Please feel free to chime in and give feedback if you are a detailer who is in tune with what I am talking about!

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:)
 
Hope you don't mind...

I edited your post. I put some BREAKS in-between sentences so it's not just one huge block of text because huge blocks of text are really hard for the human eye to read and/or follow.

Then I put breaks in-between your images to make them line up vertically with a space between each pictures so they don't all run together.


:)
 
Thanks Mike, don't mind at all, I just clicked on the insert photo and that's how it appeared, is there a better way to do this? What is your opinion on my thoughts?
 
Rastaral39 said:
Thanks Mike, don't mind at all, I just clicked on the insert photo and that's how it appeared, is there a better way to do this? What is your opinion on my thoughts?
Click to expand...


After you "attach" a photo, hit the enter key or break button to create a space or two when inserting pictures.

That's how I do it using the Tapatalk App. Not sure what you're using?


Here's what I know, the human eye cannot "easily" track from the end of one sentence to the beginning of the next sentence when looking at large blocks of text. Most people are lazy to start with and won't do the "work" involved in trying to track from one sentence to the next... so they'll simply not read.


A lesson for everyone that types on the Internet, be it this forum, any forum or Facebook. Try to break up huge blocks of text with white space. By doing this what you write will get read. If you don't do it a few people will struggle through it but most won't. They'll just scan and move on.

Just friendly tip from a guy that's been writing on the Internet since at least 1994. That's 23 years.


I mostly edited your post for me. I wanted to read what you wrote I just didn't want to work at it.


I've been meaning to write an article about how to write for the Internet world, just never did it.


:)
 
Back on topic...

The before and after results look great!



I'm sure the guy you're working for is thankful to have someone that actually knows what they are doing to take his diamonds in the rough and turn them into glistening gemstones.



:)
 
Mike, it's been a real education working in this guys cars. We have met a couple of times and we are moving back to Naples for good now, have been snowbirding for the last 6-7 yrs. I love doing interesting projects like this and would be happy to jump in on something if you need help when I get there for good. I did put up a couple more posts that ended up the same way from my IPad so I apologize in advance, looking fwd to learning how to put up a good post.
 
I work on a lot of vintage cars like this one for a few local shops/collections and I deal with the same type of paint issues. Most of the time they are cars being prepped for auction and need some serious correction to look decent. Poor repaints/color matches, texturing, solvent pop, rotary burn through, pitting, nibs/drips, and gouging from body shop sanding are all very common. A lot of the body work on these cars was done quite a while ago so sometimes we still end up dealing with single stage paint. Often times the body work is cheap since at the time of the work the cars value may not have been that high. Pretty typical with stuff like Ferrari 308/328s and older air cooled Porsches.

Feels good to bring these cars around though and get them looking proper again.
 
Nice to know there are others out there specializing in this type of work. Not to take anything away from daily drivers or "sprucing up" of late model stuff- I have done my share and more of these as well, I just think what we have described requires a different skill set. After all, when dealing with the conditions you described you have even less margin for error because you are dealing with "the unknown". After one has determined it is factory paint all the way, you can pretty much rest assured it will go a certain way. I did about 100 plus cars this year ( im not exaggerating), this is my living, of all conditions, so it's good to relate.
 
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