PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post

psfred · #2 08-05-2002, 07:57 PM

Adrian:

What makes a good paint job expensive is the amount of time it takes to do the hand work -- to do this corretly, you need to sand the majority of both paint jobs off the car -- no need to remove the good factory primer, nor, in fact, all of the factory paint, but you simply cannot add more paint, expecially on a car this old, and expect anything but peeling and cracks.

I've had the miserable experience of hand sanding quite a bit of paint off my brother's 75 300D -- it was damaged, and repainted by an amateur (or cheap paint place) -- way too much primer and paint, probably not compatible with the original 2-part enamal, so it cracked and pitted, usually lifting the factory primer. Messy.

Now, for the choices -- I assume you don't want to learn to spray yourself, although this is the cheapest in terms of cash spent -- you will have to do all the work yourself, and believe me, you don't wan't to learn on a collectible car! Takes a couple jobs to get the hang of this!

What you need to do is find a paint shop that will work with you by allowing you to do the bulk of the boring and easy part -- prep. You will need to remove ALL the trim, and if you want the doors to match (and you are changing the color), strip the doors, remove all gaskets, and all the windows and trim. This is the state we are currently in -- body is almost complete (one fender left) and doors are mostly stirpped. The need for a cooperative shop comes here -- you will need to transport the car to them stripped down for painting, then transport it back. To get really obsessive, you will need to remove the interior as well. We were doing quite a bit of restoration work, so went ahead and stripped that, too, except for the dash.

If you leave the trim on and paint, the paint will start to peel everywhere it was taped, and will almost always show tape marks. The gaskets will be damaged by the solvents, and show paint, and you will always find some overspray somewhere.

Once you get all the trim, etc off, you need to sand the paint, carefully, with the appropriate shape blocks, down to where you can see the orignial factory primer, but not through it. Lots of work and dust, but you can get a finish almost indistinguishable from factory paint this way.

Let the shop paint the car, let it sit a couple weeks, if possible, then reassemble.

Another alternative is to find a good independent shop that will allow you to do all the trim removal, etc, then do the sanding and other prep for you. Still expensive, especially if you find body work that need to be done.

The last, and the only chain I would recommend, is MAACO. They will limit you to the colors they use (they buy the stuff in 55 gal. drums), but it is good paint, not cheap stuff. They will do the very minimum of prep, no body work, but will allow you to do anything you want, I think, so long as you don't expect a warrenty on your work and accept responsibility for what anything you do does to the paint. I don't know if the use acceptable primer under the paint or not, you will have to ask.

One think I strongly recommend you DON'T do is get a cheap color only paint job -- I have the remains of one slowly wrecking the paint on the 280 -- it is peeling off, but adheres just enough to crack through the factory primer first, causing the factory paint to fail. Instead of having the paint polished and buffed, they had the car painted, so I can no longer just buff it out and be done with it....... I have to redo the whole car. With MB quality paint, this will cost nearly $900 for paint alone!

Peter