Prep for the next seven years
Lily, my 1967 four- door Morris Minor, has been on the road for seven years now. I cut my teeth restoring it with dad. In that time it’s been used as an everyday car and has been kept outside in all weathers. The paintwork was only cellulose, sprayed by us, and hasn’t fared that well.
I have heard it said that modern cellulose paint is of low quality, which could be part of the reason why this hasn’t lasted. Alternatively, it could be down to the quality of the spray job or the lack of epoxy primer under the paint. Either way, it was becoming obvious that if we didn’t do something about the paintwork now, it would be a much larger and more expensive job later.
Since Lily’s restoration, I have become far more aware of the different paint options and decided that Lily needed a similar treatment to the Lowlight – a bare metal twopack respray. This can’t be done at home without proper equipment, because two-pack paint contains lots of nasty chemicals and you need air fed masks and special filtering equipment for ventilation. Most spray shops aren’t that keen to take on the full respray of a restored car because it’s impossible to know what’s underneath the paint; exactly why they are reluctant became clear to us later. Luckily a friend was willing to do it, provided I assisted with the rubbing down and preparation work.
Before taking the car to him, I needed to get Lily into a position where it could be stripped and resprayed without any serious remedial work. This included taking the front wings off to deal with the dreaded rust spot near the front door. Morris Minor wings are notorious for rusting close to the A-post, and removing them normally reveals a whole host of problems, so it was with some trepidation that we took them off. Thankfully, underneath there were no horrible surprises on either side, and the zinc paint and Waxoyl that we’d put on all those years ago had done a good job of preserving the metal.
There were one or two points of deterioration and we did have to make one small patch above the bump stop on the nearside, but this was fairly straightforward with the wings off. The driver’s side wing
needed a small repair near the A-post, and I decided to replace the passenger side wing with a good used spare I had in stock owing to an earlier dent-andfiller job a few years ago to keep the car on the road.
To get a good finish we needed to remove the rear wing beading, and so loosened up all the rear wing bolts and dropped the wing away from the bodywork. What was very pleasing was that all the bolts came out easily, a result of the copper grease we’d put on when assembling the car. As I was working under the rear wing I did notice a small rust hole, and before I knew it, a hole the size of my thumbnail ended up needing a patch bigger than my hand to repair it. Other than that, it didn’t need any welding. Not bad for seven years on the road!
I kept the car in a drivable condition to get to the spray shop. This meant that the front panel, back seats, door trims, weather strips, badges etc could be removed before setting out, but upon arrival the headlamps, sidelights, door tops, bumpers, bonnet and boot lid, along with wipers, washers, door catches and handles were all rapidly removed. We wanted to use paint stripper to get back to bare metal, but before doing this we carefully checked where the filler was – these bits were stripped back to the filler with an electric sander as it is not a good idea to get paint stripper on filler and then paint over, because it could bubble through later.
The stripper worked quickly. As we’d already done this during the last restoration, there wasn’t a huge amount of paint to get off, and by the end of the first day the car was largely back to bare metal. The paint stripper was left to evaporate overnight, and most of the next day was spent sanding using 40 grit production paper to remove any remaining paint.
It was at this point we began to realise why professionals tend to steer clear of a restored car, and also why they like to use new panels, because all four wings had some degree of repairs to them and all needed filling and sanding smooth. In the end, this meant five separate skims of filler were needed to achieve a level finish.
Once we were happy with this, we applied numerous coats of two-pack primer filler, and then a thin guide coat of dark paint which was then sanded lightly off – this allowed us to check that the bodywork was smooth, as any low spots showed up as remaining patches of the dark paint. The final smoothing and sanding was very time- consuming, but after a lot of hard work we had the car ready for the top coat, three long days after driving the car to the spray shop.
After the paint, the next job will be to get the car back home and re-assemble it there. No doubt this will take much longer than dismantling as it needs to be done carefully.
“It is not a good idea to get paint stripper on filler – it could bubble through later”