How to prepare your body for painting

Achieve even panel gaps, faultless alignment and perfect profiles

Bodywork Basics

It is easy to spend many gruelling hours meticulously preparing one’s classic car in readiness for a top-notch respray, only for it to turn out looking like a glossy version of the Himalayas. This is not the result of skimping or cutting corners – but rather for the want of two essential stages: panel alignment and whole-panel profiling.

You’ve carried out all repairs and used filler to blend them seamlessly with the surfaces of the panels. Now it’s time to step back and look at each panel as a whole. You then need to step back even further and look at the entire body.

The first stage is to spend some time getting the panel fit and panel gaps as near to perfect as possible. This done, a very thin skim of filler needs to be applied across each panel. This will blend the repaired areas together and match the panels perfectly to their neighbours. It will also fill all the tiny ripples and undulations that typically cover the panels of classic cars, creating a flawless surface for the paint.

It’s a painstaking process that requires a high level of pedantry. Get this stage right, though, and your finished paintwork will look better than it was when the car left the factory. Chris Spencer of Flat Cap Classic Cars (flatcapclassiccars.co.uk) will be guiding us through the process.