After a car is striped of all the components that unbolt it is time to strip off the old paint and filler.   It is always the best practice to start from bare steel because your finished product is only as good as what is underneath.   We use a combination of chemical stripper and sandblasting for most of our paint removal.  We hope you will enjoy follow  the project.

This is after we removed the fenders, hood, trunk, and doors.

We masked off the interior to prep for paint remover.

We used a chemical stripper to remove the paint, you can see its effectiveness here.

While stripping paint we found large pockets of body filler.

Here is the body filler under the paint.

This is the patch of body filler found on the driver side of the vehicle around the rear tire.

We removed the filler using a wire wheel and an electric grinder.

Here is the panel after we removed all the old the filler.

This is the patch of filler on the passenger side of the vehicle.

We measured the depth of the filler, it was as deep or deeper than 1/2″ in some areas.  This is far thicker than you ever want to apply filler as it is more likely to crack, show defects, have air pockets, and overall creates an unstable foundation.

This is one of multiple sets of holes found under the pockets of filler. This is from an old school method of pulling dents where you drill a hole and thread a bolt into it.  You then pull on the bolt with a slide hammer to pull the dent out.

We filled all the holes with MIG welder.

The current method for pulling dents is to use a stud gun.  As you can see the stud gun welds studs to the panel and the the studs can be pulled on with a slide hammer.

After we pulled the dents out as much as possible, we used “All-Metal” as the major filling material on the dent.  “All-Metal” is a metal reinforced filler that is more durable than lightweight fillers.  We used it for filling the large dented areas because it is non-porous and resist contamination and cracking so you are less likely to have problems later on.  We were able to pull the dent out enough to minimize the thickness of the filler to a maximum of 1/4″ thickness, although the majority of the thickness is less than 1/8″.

We stripped all the paint off of the hood and the trunk.

Currently  now we finished filling all the major dents on the hood, trunk, and body. We have applied and etching primer to all the bare steel, and we are now doing finishing body work and high-build primer on these parts.

Here are some shots of the body.  The little blue blotches that you see are glazing putty.  It is a thin body filler that is used to fill small holes or minor low spots in the body.  It is one of the last steps before prepping for paint.