Suede paint...and honest history....hmmmmm?

[skipstitch]

So, I'm into the next project and although I love the suede look (my last coupe was grey primer & the car before that was base/clear). I kinda wonder about the relatively new "fad" for flat.... I've been diggin' though my hot rod history books, and aside from a few in progress cars... I wonder about flat paint bein' "period". Most of the early cars were laquer paint that was hand rubbed....most had a dull shine in the pics I find... What was/is correct for the late forties look? I'm thinkin' a hand rubbed, non cleared finish will be what I'm after on the modified....WOW, now I sound like a restorer....thoughts?

[Tinbender]

I paint some of my old bicycles with single stage urethane (catalized) Then sand and rub. Very nice finish, and you can controll the "luster" when you rub it. Makes the finish look like lacquer.

Thought it would be cool to do a rubbed through paint job. Black with just a hint of red oxide showing through.
Clark

[fab32]

My memory of the mid 50's was that the only primer I saw was on cars that were being worked on. The spot that was getting the attention was primered then the work moved on to the next spot. After all modifications were done the next time you saw the car it had a fresh coat of laquer. My memory just doesn't recall any cars that ran primer as a final finish.

Frank

[choprods]

every car I remember seeing- whether in a book ,or in real life, had shiny or fairly shiny paint. Maybe wht got the suede thing started was the fact that lots of the old cars were painted with sweepers! http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[kustombuilder]

i would imagine that most guys back in the day (as they say) would have strove to have a nice shiny paint job. i was'nt there but i imagine most wanted shiny paint and got it as soon as they had the means. still i like the primer and seude looks on certain cars. it gives a certain attitude to some cars and can be a low maintinance option as well. still if someone was building a show car in the 40s 50s or 60s i think it would have been shiny by the time it was ready for the shows.

[Tman]

Tinbender, can you post a pic of one of those bikes?

[29EHV8]

Can't you guys still get lacquer down there in?I believe my buddys paint store still has it.I'm gonna see if I can get myself some #99 Tuxedo Black........Shiny http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Mutt]

Magazine cars were all painted. If you want to get a look at what the general rodding public was driving, look at the background of drag pics in the early Hot Rod mags. Cars used to park right along the fence and were readily visible. You can get an idea from some of the online nostalgia drag sites pictures, but they won't be from the forties - mostly 50's and 60's.

http://gassermadness.com (http://www.gassermadness.com) has some early 50's shots.

http://wediditforlove.com (http://www.wediditforlove.com) is another site to check. It's a pay site, but has some free stuff too.

Dan

[50mercfan]

i too, ask many questions like this of the guys that were actually alive in the 50's. what i found out is that nobody "wanted" their cars in primer. it cost $75.00 to paint a car and $15.00 to prime one. also another intresting thing i discorved is that the "poor boys" ran the so called lakes plugs and the guys with more funds ran full length lakes pipes.

[DrJ]

Around here anyway, the next "phaze" after pastel flat primer/paint was flocked cars. The first time I saw the Baris Batmiobile it was flocked.
It looked really great on a show car but the first greasy mud puddle you went through at an intersection gutter and it was history.
I was parked across from a T-bucket at a GGs show a decade ago that still had flocked paint done in black with red flames. The kid in the car told me it was done before he was born...Had some road rash but didn't look too bad from 10 feet away. After that was the Himsl style Psycodellic ribbons on candy pearls like Skip Readeo still has on his Hemi-'34 7 window coupe.

[roadstar]

[ QUOTE ]
Thought it would be cool to do a rubbed through paint job. Black with just a hint of red oxide showing through.
Clark

[/ QUOTE ]

Thats how the guy from New York with the badass 3 window that was on the cover of Hop Up along with a couple other coupes on the salt did his. We looked at it up close this year in Bonniville and it was done really well. Deffanatly had the look of old black lacquer job that had been rubbed out too many times.

As far as the hand rubbed paint job goes, if you have ever tried to rub out a wet sanded paint job by hand you will soon find out how hard it is to get it to really shine with a luster like what you get using a wheel. And I belive that is why some of those old paint jobs had that kinda dull but kinda shiny too look.

[AV8Paul]

My rememberance of primerd cars was that primer was always considered "work-in-progress". No one I knew in the late fifties-early sixties thought about anything less than a glossy finish for their rods. Money was usually the issue. Everyone I knew that drove a primered car had a color picked out years before the car was ready for paint. My 34 pick-up that I drove in high school (graduated in 1962) never saw final paint until 1970.

[slacker_53]

[ QUOTE ]
Money was usually the issue. Everyone I knew that drove a primered car had a color picked out years before the car was ready for paint.

[/ QUOTE ]

Aah.....somethings never change........


Flatheads forever!! http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif

[Fat Hack]

Well, a few things...

For one, using magazines for your sole reference material kinda taints your results some...as you only see the "high end" cars of the given era, as Mutt pointed out. That's still true today.

(Think of some kid leafing through a 2003 issue of Street Rodder forty years from now to see what Joe Average was driving at the turn of the Century...he'll think everyone had a fiberglass billet mobile, or that we all ran fresh GM crate motors and thought up ways to make our paint look old!)

Also, getting a car painted a few decades ago wasn't quite the issue it is today. People thought nothing of spraying a car in their driveway on a nice afternoon. My Dad did his car that way one Saturday as we played nearby. You didn't have scalper prices on laquer and environmentalists going ape-shit so much back then!

(The city recently "busted" my neighbor for spraying one of his cars in his garage...raised all kinds of Hell with him. Meanwhile, another buddy of mine living in Taylor does show quality paint and body work out of HIS home garage...and nobody cares!)

I think there was also an issue of pride back in the 50s and into the 60s, too. A guy just didn't WANT to drive around in a primered car, or one with mis-matched colors on various panels. Even the cheapest of them probably strived to get their car covered in one color as quickly as possible!

(I've matched replacement panels on some of my old cars with spray cans in my younger days with good results and managed to keep even my lowest budget rides all one color for the most part...and I think I represent the very LOW end of the budget scale when it comes to building cars!)

So, even though magazine feature cars may not show what's actually being driven by Joe Average in any given era, I think you can decipher what look many home builders strived for by reading between the lines a little...it just takes a little more gumption to get a car painted today...especially in urban areas!

(Although my old El Camino was painted by two drunken buddies late at night in a driveway using bright flashlights...proving that if you're halfway determined...even drunken HACKS can cover their rides in fresh, sorta-shiney paint!)

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[old beet]

I lived in the S F Bay area in the early 60s. There were a bunch of custom guys that would change the color of their primer ever month or so.(just to be different I guess). Seems they all started with Grey and added some color and it had a some what suede look to it. All were pastel colors. Even saw a chopped Merc that was faded front to back from dark purple to almost white. This was San Jose about 1962-64.............OLDBEET

[Fat Hack]

Well, I think you can sorta sum it up with a quote from an old car buddy of mine from back when we were still in high school...he'd just scrapped his primered 70 Mustang and bought a freshly painted 68 Cougar to dump his Cleveland into.

When I asked why he'd scrap the old Mustang and spend money on the Cougar, he said:

"Hell, I'd NEVER get laid in that primered piece...no matter HOW fast it was!"

It musta worked...he married a chick who also drove a sweet lookin' Cougar! http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/cool.gif

[48_HEMI]

In So. Cal in the fifties primer was the norm. after they started putting paint in cans. eight cans would do a car at the cost of 4 bucks but you couldn't do it in one day unless you had a real job. gas was 19 cents a gallon and a can of primer was 49 cents. you do the math. my first job was at Gwinn's drivein resturant in east Pasadena. before they built Bob's Big Boy down the street. I was making 65 cents an hour and took home 13 bucks a week sitting up trays and filling water glasses, salt&pepper shakers. Had a complete soda fountain and a car parker for people that couldn;t drive well enough to get in and out of tight places (can you say chicks with daddy's car) the car hops were mostly old broads in their 20's and 30's and used to kiss me on the top of my head to piss me off. the guy that parked cars was the greatest driver I had ever seen at the time. he had a brand new 54 pontiac starchief convertable with a contintal kit that looked 30 feet long he could (and did) back that tuna boat up at about 15 mph and whip it in between two car and jump out over the door. he was quite the showman.
Now if you went to the Beach (long Beach) and drove down Atlantic all the way.You would see some nice painted cars. L.A. only had two freeways back then. the Pasadena Freeway was the first in the U.S. (maybe the world) built in 1939. and the Harbor freeway.There were some nice cars in Pasadena,Eagle Rock, Glendale and Arcadia and Monrovia, but they were so rare that you dropped you're jaw when you saw one. Primer was every where and some who wanted a permanant flat went for Zolatone like in the trunk of mid 50's G.M. cars. colored primers were for wayout customs in progress but hot rods were light or dark gray. in fact Pep Boys dark gray primer was marked on the cans "HOT ROD GRAY". I'm sure it was different in different parts of the country. At that time we thought we were "IT!" period. all though we heard stories that they were building HOT RODS in far away places like San Diego LOL
IN the late 50's the world changed with HOT ROD MAGAZINE started showing a few cars in other parts of the world like PORTLAND OREGON
and KANSAS http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[cougardan]

Years ago, my dad told me that they used to mix a little color into their light grey primer. He was in the Air Force in the late 50's and spent time in Victorville, Cal.
so he would have seen that west coast look.

I seem to remember him telling me that some guys would rub down there primer with some kind of oil to seal it and keep it from staining so much. Not everybody could afford a real paint job.

Dan

[choprods]

Also- what we may now mistake for "primer" look was in fact a paint job done with alkalyd enamel[DULUX ETC] that has chalked up till dull.....[and ,boy did they!] http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[DrJ]

I don't get it I guess.
Just because some guys, well a lot of guys, never got past primer because they were too poor to buy paint or weren't evr finished enough to paint it before they turned it, is that a reason today to call primer "done"?
A lot of the cars in magazines you think had flat paint were really the victims of bad photos printed with worse printing methods.
'Plus if it's a "movie car" like a lot of the Barris cars, they were sprayed with flatteners for the movies so the reflection of the mick boom and reflector board handlers didn't show on the side of the car. And these pics made it into magazines.
Movies used to be made with the windshields removed or the rear view mirrors removed in the straight on scene and magically back in the side shot and gone again in the next. Headlights were frosted for movies so the didn't glare in cameras.
Until the late 60's when the flat pastel primer came into craze, primer was a step, not a finish. Sometimes it might have just been a "stop" out of the old give up on it ituation but I don't think any number of people of consequence stopped at primer on purpose.
(Yea, there's always exceptions...) http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

[TagMan]

My first car was a '56 Chebby more-door in 1962. Cost me $15 from a junkyard and the 235 6 cyl ran well....well enough for me at the time, anyhow. Same junkyard (no salvage yards back then, as I recall) sold me four used tires for $20. I had to replace all the brake lines. The car was in black primer and I was too embarrased to drive it to school, cause the other guys that were way cooler (RE: older) had shiny paint. I drove that car for two years until I could afford a better looking ride. When I got rid of it, I sold it for $50 more than I had into it. Only car I ever made money on!! http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif I guess I don't remember a whole lot of cars running around with primer on them back then.

[mytlo56]

Hmmm...

I often wonder about the whole period-perfect suede thing too. I have quite a collection of old magazines from the late 40's/early 50's and everything has paint on it.

Never-the-less, I like the idea of having a really well detailed, nicely primered rod w/ the 2-3 g's that would have been spent on paint spent on the motor instead.

Shiney is cool, but 11 second quarters are cooler...at least in my book http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

[old beet]

I also remember at the time(late 50s-early 60s) most "serious" street racers didn't like there cars lookin too sharp. If a guy had a really nice finished ride, he could afford a hot mill also. Hard to drum up a good money race if ya looked too good..........OLDBEET

[warbird]

I think DrJ has it right.

Of the bunch I ran with "way back when", only a couple of guys had cars that where "done". Engine, paint and interior, thats the order that things got worked on. Most of us never got much beyond the motor before we were out of money, but I don't know of anyone who didn't fully intend to take it all the way someday. As far as primer goes, you only saw that on work in progress. Primer spots=squirrel!

One poor bozo rattle-canned his otherwise stock Pontiac one weekend and had to live with the abuse until he graduated and left for the service. Ruined a damn nice car, too. http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif

[Scraper]

I think Mr. Roth hisself once said as long as your car is primered, you have an excuse; as soon as it's painted...YOU'RE DONE! http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
All I know is that I roll primer 'cause I can't afford four chrome wheels! http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif However, like it was mentioned, the color is picked out and has been for a while and it will still be flat. BC/CC paints dry flat if you skip the clear (metallic suede), and I just love the sheen of flat metallics.I guess my point is don't do it based on period, do it based on what you like. After all, it is your car. Oh, the pastel primer thing is from tinting a light color (like light grey). If you can find a primer that has the color close to what you're after, you'll be better of. I had a friend who couldn't figure out why his car kept going mint green..turns out he was dumping green toner in white primer http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif oops.

[67Imp.Wagon]

[ QUOTE ]
Also- what we may now mistake for "primer" look was in fact a paint job done with alkalyd enamel[DULUX ETC] that has chalked up till dull.....[and ,boy did they!] http://www.jalopyjournal.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[/ QUOTE ]


I think Choprods has a good point that I was gonna bring up. I'm too young to know first hand how the cars were done back in the day. I was'nt born till 63. But paint did'nt hold up like it does now. I think about the first car I had which was a 70 Maverick and what it looked like when I got it. It was 8 years old and the paint was so flat by that time I could'nt even wax it back.My dad got some guy to paint it for me for $80, supplies included. Car still looked like hell due to the cracking of the previouse finish but I did'nt care cause it was shiney and thats all that mattered to me at the time.

[tommy]

[ QUOTE ]
I kinda wonder about the relatively new "fad" for flat.... I've been diggin' though my hot rod history books, and aside from a few in progress cars... I wonder about flat paint bein' "period". Most of the early cars were laquer paint that was hand rubbed....most had a dull shine in the pics I find... What was/is correct for the late forties look? I'm thinkin' a hand rubbed, non cleared finish will be what I'm after on the modified....WOW, now I sound like a restorer....thoughts?

[/ QUOTE ]

When digging through the old magazines to find out about what was really happening in the 50's is the same as assuming EVERYBODY is driving a Boyds, Foose or Trepanier cars today. Do you see those cars at the cruise nights? The cars made the 50s magazines because they were special cars. State of the art for that time.

I can dig the "rat rod" cars because they are a lot closer to what I saw and lusted after in the real world back then. I drooled over the magazine cars but they were fantasy for me (and still are). The cars I saw going up and down the street were light years away from the "show cars" that we saw once a year when the Custom car show came to town.

The cars in the magazines then and now are the top of the food chain, not the everyday hot rodder.

If you frenched the head lights over the weekend you better have it ready to get to work on Monday.

They primered low buck do it yourself cars are the ones that were in my real world and they are the ones that still turn me on. I'm not trying to be "period corerect". I'm trying to build a car the way they used to in my neighborhood.

Man! it would cost a couple of hundred dollars to get a lacquer paint job back then. You shittin' me?

[saltflataddict]

"If you frenched the head lights over the weekend you better have it ready to get to work on Monday."

Damn straight.. Thats life when its your only car.