An FD owner wanted to re-spray his bonnet, and after seeing my red Civic, he immediately specified that he wanted the current paint to be totally removed first, right down to bare metal.

Wow!!! I instantly knew that he would have gone through lots of American literature on restoration, show car painting and of course, loads of those American reality shows on car makeovers…......and I was correct.

Q: When you re-spray either a panel or an entire car, do you need to start on bare metal?
A: Mostly…NO.

Technically, theoretically and professionally, it is of course logical to start work on bare metal. But…..
Realistically and practically, in the real world in Msia, on current non-American cars here, being used as daily drivers (not show cars) it is not necessary to sand down to bare metal first.

Please remember the following points:

Very old vehicles.
Sanding down to bare metal is normally advocated on very old cars that hv been repsrayed many times, and having lots of repaired patches accumulated throughout the decades. Then, its logical to do a complete stripping of the paint.

Price and time
If you are still wondering why some people would bother to pay RM4000-8000 or more for a respray job, and feel it’s a waste of money, and can’t understand why a re-spray takes more than your assumed 1 week-1.5weeks, then pls don’t even start talking about stripping down to bare metal.

Material problem
American cars, and especially hotrods (ahhh…those silly reality shows again), have much thicker gauge metalwork. That’s why, the entire car can be blasted with sand, plastic beads, baking soda, ice chips or crushed sea shells to remove all paint and rust. Wow…this is "exotic" and unheard of by many Msian re-sprayers!! If done on our thin-skinned Asian cars, this kind of media- blasting can warp and distort the metal panels if not carefully executed. That’s why, in Msia, most sprayers still use chemical paint-strippers and chisel away. Loads of work, lots of time needed, and of course…expensive.

Prep Work.
Stripping to metal also means loads of extra work further on. All paint stripper residue must be removed 100% to prevent problems later on.
Then, 2K epoxy primer must be applied asap to the bare metal (or it’ll rust), and this hard stuff is a pain to sand smoothly. Then layers of primer, colourcoat and clearcoat can be applied.

In conclusion, if your car is not a very old car with loads of rust and layers of old paint, is used as a daily driver, and you don’t understand why others spend more than RM5k on a paintjob, kindly put aside the thought about sanding the entire car down to bare metal.
Looks great in reality shows, and very captivating to newbies. But then again those shows never tell you the cost. Even if you know the cost, most cant afford to allocate months just to create a show-car paintjob