Once we had the car running good, we started worrying about the cosmetics. We made the mistake of reading the supplemental regulations prior to our first SCCA Divisional , and it stated that cars must have a suitable paint job. No primered cars… In my 16 years of autocrossing and 11 years of competing at the Divisional and National level, I have never seen anybody ejected from an event for driving an ugly car, but we didn’t want to be the first! So, after loading the car on the trailer for the trip, I walked into the garage and took inventory of the spray paint. I had more black than anything else, and since several of the body panels were already black, it was a no brainer. In less than an hour, we had a black car again. The paint dried on the highway… I also happened to have a bunch of orange vinyl (why, I don’t know), so that became the defacto number color. It was beautiful! Okay, so it looked like crap… but it did look better! Later we changed to some better looking white numbers and had it looking a better still… from a distance.

That was good enough for the time being, but we wanted a nice paint job for the long haul. At one particularly hot summer events I was playing a pyrometer and touched it to the roof of the car. It was 165 degrees on the surface! I then checked a white car and it was basically the same as the air temperature. We later checked into the price of various paints and found that white is significantly cheaper than any color. It sounded like another no brainer, and good project for the offseason.

After our final event in November or December of 93, we slowly got to work on prepping the body for paint. After a good bit of procrastinating we finally got semi busy during my Christmas vacation. On New Years Eve day, I made a few calls to some of the plastic bead blasters around the Austin area to get a feel for prices. After a few calls, we get a guy that says, "If you can have the car here by noon and will pay me $125 cash, I’ll have it ready for you by 5:00"

Deal! We loaded up the car and stopped by the ATM on the way to his shop. When we get there, we meet this guy that looks like Sam Kinnison and probably partied like him. He claimed he had been a bounty hunter or a private eye and was looking for a little less dangerous occupation… Uhhh, okay….

He had us do all of the masking and help him push it into the bay and then told us to come back in a few hours. We got there at about 4:30 and the car was bare steel. Except for the fender and doors from the old car. Apparantly the paint used on that car was a heavy duty epoxy paint that seemed nearly impervious to the blast media.

Next the car was hauled to Mike’s House where the paint was to be applied. This was undoubtedly the dumbest thing the two of us had ever done… painting a car in someone’s garage. The overspray got onto and into everything. It was pretty cold outside when we were doing this, so we had two box fans mounted in the windows of the garage and the small window in the door to the house open to allow warm fresh air to come into the garage. The fans were obviously not strong enough to keep the air flowing through the door window because we found a fair amount of overspray in his laundry room and also in his kitchen and breakfast room. I am sure he still has areas where it is still evident. So, as they say, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!!!!

In the end, the finish was about as dull as you would get with Krylon. Mike spent many days with the polishing compound and a buffer and managed to get it to the nice luster it has today.

Here it is before the numbers. This would have been a cool looking street car, but I don’t think I could have afforded the $5.25/gallon gas!