Auto Restoration 101

As soon as we could we prepped the outer body panels on the Mercury and sprayed them with some epoxy primer. We used a 3M Clean & Strip disc and went over the quarter panels and the tail panel. They were already starting to rust just from sitting over the weekend. We also sprayed epoxy primer on the firewall and the door jambs.
Basically we applied the epoxy primer on the areas that we are going to be doing body work and making the body really nice. The rest of the body will be getting sprayed with the Zero-Rust coating such as the underside of the body and the inside of the body. I do not use the Zero-Rust on the outer panels. The reason I don’t is because there should be no rust on the exterior panels underneath the exterior paint.
On the exterior panels you should use a good paint system. Either starting with an epoxy primer or an etching primer. There are several good brands of paint, Sikkens, PPG, DuPont, BASF, Sherwin Williams and so on.
Also do not apply epoxy primer over the top of Zero-Rust. They are not compatible. The epoxy will not set up and/or wrinkle the Zero-Rust.

Notice the gray epoxy primer on the quarter panel. The red is the Zero-Rust. I opted for red because the original primer on the body was red. This really doesn’t make any difference. Even though it gets all covered up, I just thought it would be more original looking on the inside parts of the body where it will not get painted such as the insides of the quarter panels.

Also remember that no rust repairs have been made yet. This is just the first step to protect the body from rusting again after it was blasted.

Stay tuned! The next step on the body will be doing all of the necessary rust repairs.