Classic Car Body Work: Sanding

All right, so Jordan and I have been sanding on this for about an hour. And the key to any paint job is the prep work. The more time you take getting this thing perfectly smooth, perfectly straight, the better your paint job's gonna look. And I can't stress enough how important it is to actually block sand this, don't use a DA on it, you can see those things a mile away. They just, they look shimmery almost, the undercoat does, the base coat does. So you gotta use a block sander, you got to put the time in if you want this thing to look nice, straight and true. So what we're looking for is a uniform color. With this particular primer, it gets lighter as you sand it. So it starts this dark color here, and as you sand it, you get this light color. So as we're sanding this thing, we're looking for the sand scratch swells, any kind of imperfections that that black color will show up in, or that darker color will show up in. And we just use a regular, well, it's just a paint squeegee that you get at the paint store. And right here, I don't know if we have a good camera angle on this, but you can see there's dark spots right here. So there's a little sand scratch swells right here that we're gonna have to just keep sanding until all that gets to this uniform color. So I'm gonna keep sanding on it and we'll get this thing all prettied up and get it ready for a base coat. So as we're getting closer, what we're using to block sand this is 400 wet dry paper on just a regular rubber sanding block. When we get into the contoured areas here, we've got sanding sponges that don't actually have sandpaper on 'em, you have to wrap the 400 grit around them. There's firmer ones or softer ones to get into these curved areas. And I'll be using those a little bit later on that. But for now, I'm gonna finish this up. And it's important if you knew, if you had breakthrough anywhere, where you actually sand through back to bare metal, you need to actually put a quick coat of sealer on here. If you don't break through, this is a perfectly good base for the paint. Now I'm gonna switch over to that sponge. I'm gonna get the curved areas here. And, again, what I'm looking for when I squeegee is just dark spots where it looks like a sanding mark, or it looks like just an imperfection of some sort. All right, well, I did break through in a couple of spots here on this edge so I've got bare metal showing. So we're gonna have to put a quick coat of sealer on this here, but this is definitely not the time to start cutting corners. 'Cause you gotta have this base coat on here, you gotta have good primer against the metal. Otherwise the paint is just gonna bubble up. You gotta have a good epoxy primer against the metal. So what I'm gonna do is get this cleaned up the rest of the way, and then we'll shoot a quick coat of sealer on there, and it'll be ready to flip over and we'll paint the jam first, flip it back over and put some base coat on the door.