|
|
| Areas Masked and Body Filler Applied Proud to Dents. |
Car: 1991 VW Golf Mk2
Colour: Marine Blue
Most old cars, will usually have suffered from some sort of knocks/bumps/dents to the bodywork at some point during their life. This VW Golf Mk2 was no exception!
The Golf's bodywork was in very good condition generally when we got it. Although it did have a couple of obvious small dents on the bonnet.
The dents were noticeable, so it was decided to do something about them. There are many companies that will remove small dints and dents. A lot of the companies that do dent removals, offer a mobile service, where they will carry out the necessary repairs at your place of home or work.
We decided we would repair these dents ourselves, as this would be the cheapest option! Although the positions of both of these small dents, meant that they could not simply be pushed back out from underneath. So they would have to be filled with car body filler and therefore they would of required a re-spray! Oh no!
Most companies that do respray a vehicle, prefer to respray a whole panel or at least a small section upto any edges or changes in contours. We just wanted to repair the bad area, so knew this may prove more difficult to blend in!
We chose to go to the local VW Main Dealer to obtain the correct aerosol paint for the vehicle, rather than buying paint from a car shop. Hopefully, this would give a better colour match to the original paint than any aftermarket brand of paint could achieve.
We were pleasantly surprised to find out, that not only could we get paint ordered quickly, but it was also cheaper than those aftermarket cans from the car shops!
The first thing to do was to fill the dents with car body filler, but to keep any mistakes to a minimum, we put some masking tape around the immediate area, in case it all became a bit to messy!
The area was overfilled, and then sanded back down level with the bonnet. The masking tape was kept in place at first, preventing the rougher wet & dry paper from scratching the surrounding area. It was only removed as finer wet &dry came into use. We were more than happy that we had managed to blend the filler smoothly into the original paintwork of the car.
If you are painting a larger area you should just be able to mask off the rest of the car once then do all your painting in one go. In this instance, and trying to keep the painted area as small as possible, meant we would have to mask off the bonnet a couple of times, this making sure all the undercoat would be covered by the topcoat.
The dents were painted in undercoat, then we smoothed them down again with wet & dry, before re-masking prior to topcoat.
The blue topcoat was put on in a couple of overly thick layers. The trouble with aerosols is trying to control the flow from them, and the VW cans seemed to spray very heavily, so we just did the best we could. The paint had not gone on as well as expected, and seemed to be more overspray than gloss by the time we had finished!
We left the paintwork for a few weeks before we decided to try and buff it up. We used polish, then by both hand and machine methods, tried to improve the finish. After several hours of buffing, it seemed we were able to get the desired finish we had wanted to achieve.
The paintwork on the bonnet came up superbly. The last few photos above show the dents and paintwork were no longer visible. In fact we had done far better than we ever expected to!
Hurray!
|
|
|
