Surface Preperation

Surface Preperation

Surface prep is vitally important in order to prepare for painting. Getting the surface clean and providing the right kind of adhesion for the paint to stick to.

Since most repairs in a body shop are partial paint jobs. We will talk about these first.

1.Start by washing the car with soap and water. This will remove any normal road grime.

2.Follow this with a good wax and grease remover like a PPG DX330 or GON. To do this we apply the wax and grease remover with either a pump spray bottle or soak a rag and flood a small area. Taking a clean lint-free cloth, wipe off all the wax and grease and contaminates, wiping toward you. Overlapping just like your spray gun. Make sure that you keep your rags clean. We need to do both of these steps in order to keep from pushing surface contamination down into our paint or primer.

3.We can now start to sand our paint finish. Sanding provides a great mechanical adhesion for primers and paints to stick to. If you sand or strip it down to bare metal, we still need to use the wax and grease remover. We will be using this frequently because it is safe on all finishes and will help remover all the oils and greases that come from our hands and other areas as we work on the car. If we have bare metal, this now needs to be protected by either an epoxy primer or a self etch primer. If you still need to do some body work, it should be a 2 part epoxy like a PPG DP40LF. See our section Primers.