The car is painted as off yesterday! We had an old friend paint the car who is a fulltime painter with 10 years expierence, he said it was the hardest car he has ever painted! The DuPont three stage paint was very thin. The base coat is like water and very white in color. The mid coat privides a deep mustard tint with pearl and metallic flakes. The final coat is the indestructable DuPount clear coat. The diffuculty in painting was due to the nature of the paint, the lines of the car, and the height. It was a little too high on the homemade dolly to make painting comfortable.
All week I have been working late to get the car wet sanded with 400 for the paint job. I am a little worried that the door jams will not come out the same color as the exterior. The exterior was first coated with something like a tinted sealer to provide uniform color, however the jams were not. We will see on monday when we can roll the car out into the sunlight and pull the masking tape off. The car took seven hours to paint not including the masking and prepping we did. There is a very slight orange peel but its very reasonable. Every car has to be color sanded and buffed, we will make preperations for that task.
News on other fronts, I have sent all my motor parts to Al Liest who has built a lot of motors for the pantera crowd. He also is a member of NorCal Pantera Club and owns a pantera. I know the motor is in good hands. I have also collected all the suspension parts I believe I'm going to need. Either this week or next weekend I will have the car towed to my house where I can start the assembly.
Oddly enough the day the car was painted was also my wedding anniversary! This car has been a relationship of the marriage degree. I would be lying if I said it wasn't the cause of some friction in my relationship with my wife as well. However we were both very happy to see it painted and the progress we have made in the last two months has been great. I have owned this car for almost three years now. Most of those three years the car has been undrivable in various stages of restoration. I know I still have a large amount of work to do but there is defintely a new energy in the air after car gets painted. The fun part of putting all the nice parts on and seeing the metal shell actually become a car, is about to begin.
If any of you are keeping track of the numbers here is the tally of time and money that it took to get the shell to this stage; 8 hours of paint work, $400. Over 10 gallons of painting material, $650. 100 hours of blocking and sanding and shaping, $5,795. 8 months of metal work, rust repair, and panel replacement, $6,000. There was one year of non-activity which accounts for the long timeframe. Despite the large numbers I got a really good deal on paint, retail would have been $1,000, and all the labor that was done on the car was outside legitimate "body shops". Three different people worked on the body of this car, painter Mark Kallagher, body man Cliff Sniatowski, metal worker Jimmy Stix. All of these folks worked on this car put an amazing amount of time into the car. Most everybody that comes in contact with the car falls in love with it which helps. But most of the folks that worked on this car say they would not do it again. The pantera is a lot of work. Not only must you find somebody with the artistic talent it takes to work on this car but also the patience and persevernce. Thank you all. If anybody would like to contact these individuals please send me an email, they all are located near the Bay Area California.
If you aren't aware the links on the right hand side of the page are links to the history of this pantera log. You can trace this log all the way back to Jan of 2000 when the restoration was begining. Time to reflect and contemplate the future! Vrooooooooooom!!!
Last month when I went to the Precision Proformance BBQ I took several pictures that I wanted to share with you all ...
