wssix99

iTrader: (5)

It's time to paint my '99 Formula. It's a largely stock WS6, all-season city car and has a good bit of associated rash, dents, etc. The car is now in a proper garage, so its time to get the body in proper order.

I was kicking around the possibility of a color change (its currently black) but I think I've settled on keeping the stock color to avoid all the usual hassles with that.

I've already removed the power antenna in lieu of an internal unit and have a new Fiberglass Hood Panel from 6LE Designs to address the typical bubbling.

Are there any other common things I should address with the body that I'm not thinking of while I do this job?

I have some spider web cracking around my Formula spoiler 3rd brake light, presumably from the pressure of closing the hatch. I've always wondered if I should reinforce that area before new paint?

I'm also kicking around the idea of removing the side moldings along the fenders and the door. Does anyone have an opinion on that? Pictures? Maybe that will work against me for a City car? They have been used as bumper car bumpers from time to time...

Aaron23

I am in the middle of a paint job too. Check your door handle to make sure it isn't worn and rubbing the door. I removed the door moldings. Looks more modern. I also got all my paint through "E-wood" (non sponsor).

Sand out those spider webs. It is most likely just the paint.


Good luck!

mhorn0817

Whatever you see in your paint now, if you don't properly fix, you'll see it 10xs worse when it's fresh, especially with black. Make sure the car is fully detrimmed and taken apart so there no tape lines and all the edges are properly sanded. Also with spider web cracks, make sure you go down to the metal/plastic, they look like they go away when you sand them but unless you strip that are, the cracks will still be there

wssix99

iTrader: (5)

Thanks. My body shop said that they have experience with these and gave the same advice - strip it all off and repair.

Steve91T

I'm interested to see people say about removing the trim. I've thought about the same thing. It's probably a big job.

deebee

OP,

Good choice keeping the original color. Even if you paint all the jambs and the engine bay the best you can (which costs $$$$) it will kill the value of the car and I bet tougher to resell. I would never buy a car that had a color change. Also you would probably be dealing with peeling door jambs etc. down the road as no matter how good the shop is, it is hard to get in all the crooks and crannies when sanding/scotchbriting

Have you looked into fixing the hood if possible? If not, keep the stocker in case you sell the car. I have yet to see a fiberglass hood that fit properly. And they are prone to cracking as well. If it were my car and the bubbling on the stock hood wasn't too bad I would fix the stock hood. It is just my taste but I don't like aftermarket hoods at all. They never fit right and look bad.

Any cracking, if not addressed, will show through. If it is just paint cracking, it has to be sanded down to the surface to correct it. If it is the actual panel cracking, it has to be repaired. I am unsure of the repair procedure on that hatch but maybe make sure there is some sort of guarantee it won't crack again. Should it be repaired from both sides, or can it be properly repaired from the top only? As mhorn817 said, those imperfections will show through again.It might be right after paint, it might take several months but they will come back if not addressed.

As for the bodyside moldings, they are painted from the factory with a flex additive. When dinged, they may mark but won't (shouldn't) chip. If you leave them on the car and just repaint them, the paint they use on your car will be more brittle and prone to chipping from impact if someone opens a door into it etc. If it were my car I would just leave them on and roll the dice. If someone hits your car hard enough it will mark it anyways.

Someone else mentioned removing trim. Not the easiest thing to do but the more things you remove the better the end result will be. You will less likely have to deal with masking lines, overspray on moldings, tape edges, or the possibility of peeling around the trim, under the door handles etc.
If it were my car I would remove all that stuff myself. It is time consuming but really not that hard to do. Plus you can make sure it all fits nice and snug when you reinstall it. It will save you a lot of bucks. A lot of shops just mask. We always removed door handles, mirrors, belt moldings, tail lights, marker lights, grilles etc.

RPM WS6

iTrader: (3)

I don't entirely agree with this, as it all depends on the quality of the work and, in terms of value/desirability, the details of the car in question.

My '71 is a color change car. It was done properly; disassembled where needed, and all jambs and such were fully stripped and repainted in the new color (engine bay was not a concern either way as they were all black on these older GM cars - but this would be a much bigger deal on something like a 4th gen where engine removal, to paint the bay, is such a hassle.) The repaint was done by a previous owner around '00 and the paint (including trunk underside and door jambs) still looks great 15+ years later. The old color was Code 62 Burnt Orange - not particularly popular, the new color is Code 14 Cortez Silver. The interior was (and still is) originally black, so it goes well with either color (this is an important consideration - if you're going to change the exterior color, it needs to complement the interior color nicely.) Did this hurt the value of the car? Not at all, IMO. The new color is much more popular and universally desirable, and the car is not a numbers matching rare COPO or Yenko model or anything of the sort, so originality is not critical in this case. Honestly, nobody would even know this was a color change car unless they knew how to read the cowl tag and had reference material for color codes of this era.

Having said all that, I agree that a color change *can* result in a car that nobody wants (due to poor quality work, poor exterior/interior match, or lost value if the car is a super rare #1 or #2 condition desirable collector piece), but that's not always the case.

deebee

RPM WS6,
Yes, there is a right way to do it. I agree with you. But that would involve removing the hatch, the doors, the hood, the engine, fenders, tail lights, bumpers, all the trim, etc.
I have done plenty of color changes like that and it costs a TON of money. The right way is to basically strip it to a shell.

Of course you could do a budget color change, but it is impossible to sand all those tight areas. And I have done dozens of those types of color changes. Wouldn't guarantee a thing as far as proper prep as it is simply not possible to do. I was just in the engine bay on my 96 Z and forget it. If I were a shop I wouldn't even touch it. You could always live the innards of the car the original color but would that look ridiculous or what?

As far as ruining the value, I should have said that is my opinion. And again, my personal taste is that I would never buy a color changed car. If the color doesn't match the paint code on the door sticker/vin etc. then to me the value is decreased. If there are two WS6's sitting there and they are identical, identical price and one is color changed I am knocking at least $2k off the color changed car. (again, just my opnion)

If OP were to do a "proper" color change the labor alone would cost more than that car is worth.

wssix99

iTrader: (5)

No need for any further debate here. I've already killed the value of the car by driving it in a major American City for 130K+ miles. I don't have any major accidents but every single panel of the car, except for the two doors and one front fender has some sort of composite repair or slathering of bondo underneath the paint!


The City decided to derail my homebuilding project and send me back for $20K of home revisions. We're fighting that, but I'll have to shell out enough that this project will be modified and sectioned out.

I just got the front fenders and bumper cleaned up/repaired and a new roof panel put on to fix the infamous paint bubbling. Fixing my dented rear fenders, chipped hood, and paining the doors will have to wait until we wrap up the home construction...

But anyway - since cleaning up the body is now a multi-part project - the car will main black. (At least until the car is ready for a body-off restoration sometime far far far in to the future.)

wssix99

iTrader: (5)

This car will never be sold. I will either run it into oblivion, be buried in it, or loose it forever (along with my body) due to some grand act of misadventure....

Fixing my dented fenders will cost more than the car is "worth." (Maybe not - but my body work, in whole, certainly is.) Fortunately, my wife caused one of the dents while we were in a small temporary garage during our house construction, so I'm "entitled" to the repair.)

wssix99

iTrader: (5)

Fixing the chip in the hood is very expensive, but I'm going to do that on the original hood. I see that the OEM WS6 hoods are valuable and I do want to retain that part. (In case I die outside of the car and my wife needs to sell it someday.)

RPM WS6

iTrader: (3)

Agreed. And I know of several local antiques/classics that have been done this way including mine. If you are extensively or completely restoring the car, especially when speaking of much older cars, you'll want to do a great deal of disassembly and stripping either way, to address deterioration/corrosion or just to improve the aged factory paint in all those inner areas (modern factory paint is much better, so in that case I agree that jambs can normally be restored without repainting if the color is to remain the same.) At that point, a color change isn't much additional hassle within the scope of the project. Lots of old cars were painted in colors that aren't desirable today, changing such a color (assuming the interior color is still complementary) to something more universally desirable may actually result in an increase in value for some of the more garden variety antiques (mine would probably be an example of this.) Of course, the cost of a proper color change will never be recovered in this case, but then neither would the cost of a comprehensive restoration on all but the rarest and most valuable examples (and as applied to 4th gen F-bodies like the one in question here, there really is no "collector value" for any example that has been worn to the point of needing paint/restoration - only low mile garage queens have any hope of such premium value in the forseeable future.)