DDK - Die Deutschen Klassiker

Word.

Nothing that a few (painted) Ivory stripes and/or decals couldn't transform into something individual

(Cue a long process of decision-making ending in a final "birthday suit" finish)

Beige beige beige beige.....

Please promise you'll never give up on this one Jamie - reading your musings as you continue on your journey is something I look forward to and as Darren says, that image down the side of your car looks sharp. Really sharp.

The car looks great in beige too!

jamie wrote:"Two years... Two years talking about the colour of that sodding thing, and you're going to paint it the same baby-shite brown it was before you took it to pieces?" f*** my life.

Made me properly laugh!
Keep going Jamie and thanks for keeping on posting.. not easy when knackered & sleep deprived I'm sure!

Tonight I am in a hotel in Bavaria, somewhere between Bamboo Beige and VW Marino Yellow.

Last night: Bavaria also, Old Caterpillar Yellow

And the night before: Home, Land Rover Sandglow

I was on the phone to Darren on Monday and he said something which stuck in my head - you want the car to make your heart skip every time you open the garage door. To this point I hadn't really given that scenario any thought, and it changes things from an apologetic 1950s shade of beige, to a punchier shade of beige, or perhaps a yellow.

My old Blood Orange 72T used to make my heart jump. That colour option isn't off the cards either - I think it's the best colour Porsche ever did. The only reason I haven't considered it so far is that I've already been there. But it's a mega colour.

F****** nora.

Plans are brewing.......

We're going to make this colour choice once and for all....

You're all going to be involved.....

Jamie will soon be able to sleep and his sanity (debatable if he actually ever had any) will return.....

And we will raise a bit for our charity along the way.

Stay tuned.

With that comment, Darren nailed it for me.

For my car the vision always involved the stripe, but I can remember arriving in the taxi to collect it from the stripers. f***, yeah! went through my mind, and f***, yeah accurately reflects what I feel whenever I open the garage

So if Orange floats your boat, go Jaffa. Or that blue you liked or whatever - it's your car. but it should be a f*** yeah colour.

I'll check back in a couple of years and see how you're getting on

Latching onto the Darren Comment, I repainted my (originally Viper Green) 911T Champagne Yellow mainly because I found light colours 'hid' my body work skills, but I like light yellow too!

That was a DIY paint job in a single garage in cellulose in 1989.

EVERY time I see the car in the garage, opening the garage, parked in the village etc it excites even after a whole 27 years of living with it.

As mentioned on the previous page, with the main part of the shell complete, I have been busy prepping the front hood.

The hood was the first part of the car I started my prep work on. At this early point in the job, I was determined to build a car with absolutely no filler in it whatsoever. The spanner in that plan was that whoever owned this car in the past sure loved driving into stuff. Whilst Barry had done a nice job of removing the bigger dents, the 'this has to be fun, not a burden' part of the budget-setting process dictated that the smaller ones were to remain.

So I had applied some filler to the dents, block-sanded it back, and felt like the sort of disgusting beast that has just loaded a roll of chicken wire and five Tesco bags into the rotting sill of an MGB. I left the boggy hood propped against the wall and started working on the rest of the car.

Then, as I did more and more research on car restoration, it became clear that a significant part of any top-class resto job was really a top-class filler job. Just asyou don't get to look as dench as the folks on TOWIE or Geordie Shore without fake tan, whey protein and arsehole bleach, you can't achieve the same level of style on a classic automobile without some skim and a block sander.

It's difficult to tell, but I estimate the thickest skim of filler on the main shell of the car to be around 3 or 4mm, probably in the centre of the roof. The sides are pretty thin, and there's a few mm in one of the sills (I forget which) to make the lower edge of one door line up with it. One corner of my rear decklid is a few mm thick and looks a bit odd if you look across the end of it, but it sits very nicely when closed.

My early attempts at sorting the bonnet were feeble by comparison. So, in keeping with my work to date, I coated the whole thing in bog and blocked it back. This is how it looked after the first hit.



I re-bogged it...



Then blocked it again, this time finding the face of Jesus.





More filler.





The metal bits are high spots. You don't really want to see them, but as long as they're not too proud, they can be levelled with high-build primer. The other problem here is that it's difficult to block-sand patches of filler like this - I just can't get them to feel right.

I figured if I shot it with epoxy primer, that might help.



Stupid idea. In my haste to get the panel smooth, I applied way too much. It dried like rubber, not adhering to the panel. In a fit of rage I scraped it all off with a stanley knife scraper, and attempted to fill the gouges I had made in the filler, with several coats of high-build primer. After a few days of fighting with that, I realised I had gone way too far off-piste. Basically, bodywork is a pretty set process. If you screw with the process, things fall apart. This had fallen apart long ago.

In addition to this, the pressure regulator on my compressor had failed and, whilst I could kind of control the gun pressure using the air pressure screw, I couldn't stop 100 psi of air fed directly into the gun doing nasty things to my paint feed when the gun was shut off.



Once again, I was travelling deeper and deeper into the Heart of Darkness. For reasons I can't comprehend in my current state of mind, I tipped a bottle of paint stripper over it, just to really f*** shite up.



On earlier advice, I shut the door and walked away for a few days.

Today... Stripper wheel to the rescue. 10-15 hours of work out of the window.



Here it is with a fresh coat of epoxy.





Also got myself a nice new reg and water trap, plus mini water trap and gauge for the gun end.



I'm out of filler, so more of the same when that arrives...

You made me laugh... I was laughing at Sparks on Jools anyway and then your black bonnet pic scrolled up. Ha! That's some knacked-up, self-harmed, anger management right there. I'd have chucked it in the corner and walked away too. Keep at it. Attack it after a hard day behind the lens and know that we're all behind you, pushing and willing you on to getting that final coat of clear over dog dick pink. Ha!

Hi Jamie, loving your story and feeling your pain.

Not sure why you've shot the epoxy on it. My (learned the hard way) understanding is that you shouldn't be putting filler onto fresh paint - they can dry at different rates and move, thereby cracking the top surface. It's what I managed to do with one of my wings and I've now got a few cracks on it.

No doubt someone who knows what hey are talking about will be along to correct me.

Have you tried dolphin glaze? It's like a really really fine filler that goes on almost as a liquid. It's brill for those small dings - by the end of mine I did a good job on one of my doors using it - as judged by Neil.

I well remember my fibre glass bonnet and going through a similar 'process' but not so intense...

I would go back to steel and build back again. On many car progs people extensively use DA sanders and all manner of panel areas and shapes.
Never used one myself, just the hand held 4 x 1.5" rubber block.

Bonnet came good, high build primer was my friend, layers and layers of it.

When ready, I found the bonnet the hardest panel to paint and to keep clean of bits.

Thanks guys. Mark - the whole car has been done like this - epoxy over bare metal, then filler onto (sanded) epoxy, then another layer of epoxy over the filler, then high build over sanded epoxy. The epoxy is non-porous, so keeps the metal sealed from moisture. That's the theory, anyway. I imagine, me being me, and the car being an old Porsche, it will be disproven.

After the scraper knife / paint stripper episode, I took the whole bonnet back to bare metal with a strip disc, then shot fresh epoxy over the bare metal in order to seal it. As with the rest of the car, I will let the epoxy go off for a few days before applying filler.

I do have some Dolphin Glaze. Great stuff, but the reason I mentioned the filler thicknesses on the body shell is that the bonnet needs a lot more. Sorry, was written late at night and I don't think I got the point across. There are two dents at the front of that bonnet that need 5-6mm of filler in them to get them flat. Nasty. Dophin Glaze is good for 1-2mm, so it isn't going to help me with that. I need a bucket of Upol Fantastic. Once the thing is flat, I'll Dolphin Glaze it for the final layer.

Graham - the whole time I've been doing this, I haven't touched the car with a DA! I'll leave that to Wheeler Dealers. Sanding blocks only