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We know, you are excited to see your car restored back to full glory. We get it, we love old cars just as much as you do! But, like all good things restoring your vehicle takes time, love and a hell of a lot of elbow grease. In today’s blog we give you a break down as to why your vehicle restoration takes so long!
Rest assured though, when you do finally receive your vehicle, your beauty aka your new baby, you’ll be glad you left it to a professional who completed the job down to the finest detail!
It’s the quality paint finish
To get a quality job takes time. In our experience people want to see what they are paying for… and quality paintwork requires; time! To ensure this high standard we ensure our restoration work exceeds the minimum requirement of industry standard. We want to give you the best possible paintwork. To achieve a top quality paint job, it requires long sitting times between each of the paint applications to ensure correct resting & curing. This can take up to 5 x the waiting time for the quality result.
The paint dries from the outside in. The outside might appear dry yet without waiting, we would be applying paint on-top of wet paint and this causes movement or imperfections in the paint.
TIP: Patience is the key to a quality end result.
Did you think about production set up?
Once your vehicle has been stripped down, the major parts are required to be sandblasted off site. Then the rest of the paint work needs to be stripped and put through chemical bath at our site. This can take at least a week before anything else can move forward.
The car could require to be set up on a 360 degree rotisserie or set up on a car bench (steel frame to secure the car in a safe & supported manner). This process ensures that your vehicle stays aligned to its true body alignment to manufacturers specifications. At this point your vehicle is checked against these particular specification charts to ensure its true chassis alignment.
A lot of fiddly & fine work is done during this process and can take lot of time to ensure quality workmanship to meet the restoration requirements.
Restoration can now begin. The vehicle will stay that way until it is ready for the paintshop process.
Once in the paintshop, it is then cleaned, prepped, special degreaser, masked up and then primed in preparation for painting.
The process of paint is, firstly etch primed to treat the bare steel. Then we 2-pak prime the rest of the vehicle panels, inside and out. This ensures total coverage so that nothing is left unsealed.
This requires a resting period for at least 4 weeks.
Then we start preparation for the top-coat which can take up to an average 2 weeks before the top coat can be applied. This is a critical stage to ensure no imperfections!
Once the body is prepared for topcoat the entire vehicle is masked up and mounted in the spray booth with other appropriate panels. The top coat painting begins, which on average takes 1-2 days to paint all parts.
We allow it to rest again for 2-3 weeks! It needs to cure.
Now we assemble all panels so that the vehicle is complete with all steel work, to start the buffing process. This requires the whole car to be sanded so the paint is flat. This is another check point to remove imperfections in the topcoat.
The entire vehicle is then buffed to bring the gloss to the required level.
Sometimes this is the end of the process to meet the customer’s needs. For other customers that would like us to reassemble the entire vehicle, we would then go on to fit glass, trims, lights etc until the vehicle is fully complete.
TIP: thinking you are saving money on the refit process be warned; it’s not as simple as it looks and we often see returned vehicles to have touch ups due to unfortunate incidences by the customer in this process.
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Sureline Body Repairs, operating for more than 42 years, prides itself as one of the leaders in the industry of panel and paint. We provide the latest technology and equipment allowing us to give our customer base the best and quickest turn around in accident repair.
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