Factory Five Roadster Build Part 17: Paint Booth

Once the block-sanding is completed to Roeder's and Kester's liking, the body--still mounted to the chassis--is rolled into the paint booth for a coat of sealer. The sealer coat is applied over the freshly sanded and cleaned body. Once the sealer is dry, Roeder blocks it with 600-grit; then it's time for paint.

KR Performance & Restorations swears by the Spies Hecker line of paint products for everything from the primer coat all the way to clear. For best results, stay within one manufacturer's system.

For the base color and stripe color, we're using Spies Hecker's Permacron series. The base color is Tungsten Gray (Ford code T8) and the stripe color is Satin Silver (Ford code TL). A gallon of base and a half-gallon of stripe color were ordered from KR's supplier, St. PJ Supply.

The application of the base color, or any paint for that matter, is very much dependent upon ambient temperature, surface type, spray equipment, and so forth. Even the air pressure used to apply the paint is a variable in how the paint looks on the vehicle once sprayed.

An important part of the paint process is cutting in or "jambing" the car. This is the application of the main body color to all of the doorjambs, wheel openings, and body edges. This ensures an even coat of paint in these tight, hard-to-spray areas.

For the hood, doors, and trunk, the inside panels are painted in the base Tungsten and then clearcoated. This way, when the panels are installed for the exterior painting...

...there's less handling required of the panels, and they won't have to rest on a work surface, possibly damaging the much-more-visible exterior paint surface.

Since our stripe color is lighter than the base color, it's easy to paint the stripes. Roeder and Kester lay down a wide swath of the Satin Silver over the middle of the body (notice the hood and trunk are in place and aligned for this).

With the silver stripe color dry enough to tape over, a laser level is used to find the car's true center, and the stripe pattern is masked off from there. Using information obtained from the Factory Five Racing build school and the www.ffcobra.com forum, the stripes are tapered appropriately, adding the popular

Once the stripe is laid out and taped off, the trunk lid and hood are removed so that the Tungsten base color will cover the silver overspray around the edges of the two openings. The body is removed from the chassis yet again for painting.

As the Tungsten basecoat is applied over the taped-off stripes, the tape and masking paper disappear. The paint must dry a bit before the tape and paper can be removed.

St. PJ Supply loaned the guys a SATA Jet 3000 HVLP digital spray gun system to shoot the paint.

After the basecoats have sufficiently dried to allow tape removal without issue, Roeder and Kester carefully remove the masking tape and paper covering the stripe color. As you can see, the stripes came out perfectly. Now all that's left is to bury them in several layers of clear.

Roeder applies the clearcoat over the main body section first, using several coats to sufficiently blend the tape edges from the stripes and ensuring there is enough material on the surface for wet-sanding and buffing later. The doors, hood, and trunk are cleared separately.

After the clear dries, we get our first look at the almost-finished paint job. All that's left is to wet-sand the clear, buff out the surface with finishing compound, and mount the body back on the chassis.