Classic Car Painting: Getting Started

If you're serious about restoring classic cars, sooner or later, you're gonna have to paint something. Maybe it's not the entire car, but knowing how to paint and getting started is a good thing. We're here with Matt Rorick from MC A customs who's going to, you know, give us a little bit of his insights into getting started painting cars. So, Matt, if you had like three bits of advice to for the guy who's just getting his feet wet and actually painting in his shop in his own shop, what, what are those kind of things he should consider? Mark, I've been doing this for over 20 years and one of my main things, um, was, you know, safety.

You definitely wanna have good ventilation. You definitely wanna wear a P pe respirator have the proper clothing because any of these everything solvent based, I mean, there's a lot of water based stuff now too and you can go that way. Chances are you're not gonna have that equipment in your garage at home to do water based paint. So what you're gonna be doing is solvent based, so stay protected, make sure you got gloves, glasses, you know, paint suit respirator, all that good safety equipment. And you know, another main concern too is if you're painting something, definitely, you're gonna wanna do research on it.

You're gonna wanna do the research on, you know, like say if we were doing this, what is my, what is my OEM paint code? We're gonna have to figure out what that paint code consists of where I'm gonna be able to get that paint mixed up, how much it's gonna cost, et cetera. You just always wanna have a good solid plan of attack when it comes to doing any kind of body and paint work and make sure you do the footwork, make sure you do the research. And I mean, if you're changing the whole color of your car, you're spending a substantial amount of money to change the whole color of your car. So color plays a big factor in it too.

And if you paint your car brown, it's brown. Now, guess what? You don't like it, you're stuck with brown. So definitely make sure that you, you know, even if you're taking your car to a body shop, you know, bounce ideas off the body shop guy and the manager, the painter, whoever is there that you know, is suiting your needs, make sure everything is taken care of, make sure you've well thought each play out because it's just gonna help with the longevity of the whole entire situation, you know, even in like rust repairs, stuff like that. Always have a plan of attack.

Figure out how you're gonna cut it out, how you're gonna patch it, how you're gonna replace it and do the research to back all that stuff up. And if you are even considering painting your whole car, it's probably best not to start with your whole car. No, you make a absolute perfect point. Go out, you know, grab the kid's bike, grab a kid's pedal bike, maybe just try it out with some aerosol. See if you can get your basic motions down, you know, with, with aerosol or something before you actually step up to making the purchases and the commitments to all this stuff or, you know, paint smaller parts and, you know, carry that on as you get to bigger and bigger stuff.

It doesn't even have to be anything off the car. It could be, you know, any inanimate object that you can spray paint on, you know, just try to get some practice until you made a very good point by saying that. Yeah. And I think that's a good advice, you know, to get some practice, understand how, you know, part of it's muscle memory and part of it is experience and the only way to get experience is to do it and just keep trying it until you get it right. And I'm certain now after 20 years, you're probably a better painter than you were 20 years ago.

I'll never forget my first paint job. I'll never forget it. Oh, good advice. And, and thanks. You know, we appreciate your insights and helping to help to understand what a guy needs to do to actually get started painting his own car.