The old red paint was so faded that the sun-baked black plastic trim pieces blended right in. But, I was afraid they would ruin the overall appearance after everything else was painted. I ordered as many replacement parts as I could from the dealer. Unfortunately the car is so old that a lot of things are both out of production and out of stock. For example the drivers side door got a new side molding but the passenger side didn't. Luckily I was able to get new window trim pieces for everything except the one at the bottom of the rear hatch glass. In the near future, the lack of available parts is going to make it increasingly more challenging to restore old Japanese cars. Talk to my paint and body guy and he'd use much more colorful words than "challenging."
My good friend Marc Maksimow did all of the real work that went into the project. He normally does restoration work on classic American iron from the 50's and 60's. According to Marc, my Honda's sheet metal is much thinner than that of say a '59 Cadillac, making it significantly harder to shape. While my California car was rust free with almost flawless body panels, it still required a lot of prep work before it could be painted black. For those that don't know, black paint makes every blemish stand out. Even worse, I wanted it to be Jet Black and color sanded. There would be no orange peel or metal flakes to hide ripples and swirl marks. I had multiple body shops give me quotes on a "show quality" paint job, then suggest that the car would look good in white or some loud shade of yellow. Marc was the only person that agreed that the car needed to be painted black, and knew how much effort it would take to do it right.
I dropped off the car at an old warehouse in Alhambra, Calif. that Marc sublets. He worked on it after hours throughout the summer. First it was disassembled, then sanded, filled, sanded, spot primered, sanded, primered, sanded, then with the door jams scuffed it was eventually ready for paint.
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The face of El Luchador Chupacabra appeared in the passenger door. We took it as a sign of
Painting day was the only fun day of the process. We towed the car to a facility in East LA that rents spray booths by the hour. You'd think that the inside of the booth would be a mess but it was actually really neat. It felt like being in the bay of the space shuttle. One end draws vacuum through huge exhaust vents while the opposite wall is one giant air filter. Really, it's the whole wall, like ten by twenty feet. I can't tell you how good it felt to see the first base coat sprayed on. For months my car looked like a theft recovery that had been attacked by seagulls. The application of the base coat was the first thing done that actually made the car look better instead of worse. And with a second coat of black and two coats of clear I could finally see what the completed paint job would look like. But, in reality we were still a long way from that point.
Color sanding is a process of wrapping a semi-rigid block with fine sand paper, soaking it in water then gently sanding down all the little bumps in the paint that are commonly known as orange peel. What I should have realized was that color sanding also takes all of the shine from the paint, leaving it looking the same as it did before it was painted only darker. My enthusiasm hit rock bottom at this phase of the project. The buffing wheel fixed that though and three abrasive levels later my mirror finish paint was born. Goodbye speedy quarter fed pressure washer, hello obsessive car duster and quick detailer.