I wanted to share some work I have been doing this summer with this cheap X-O Rust I get from the hardware store. Now this isn't strictly J-Body specific, but it might be of some use with all kinds of painting needs around your home and can be used on vehicles if you so dare to.

That being said, I jump right in. I picked up an old A-Body from a buddy at work for just $500. It was rough but ran extremely good. It has the 3300 Iron Block & Iron Head and is a downsize to the venerable Buick 3.8L. Over 200K on the clock and you'd never know it is running. Mostly family owned - another coworker happens to be the main owners of this car and they took really good care of it mechanically. The guy I got it from......er....not so good.

The worst offender was the top horizontal rust - as I always seem to encounter here. Trunk & Hood I can replace, but the top had to just be dealt with. Down to the heart of my post is the fact this particular car had Gunmetal for the color. There are a thousand shades of grey. How on earth was I gonna manage to get a metallic color? Problems that I spent a lot of time pondering over. In the end I came up with a solution, surprisingly. It involved a lot of trial & error, but in the end I learned a new trick.

I worked with the Aluminum paint to get the metallic part and mixed it with gloss black to get the grey for the gunmetal. I was surprised that it doesn't take a whole lot of aluminum to lighten up the black! It goes to show that if you are willing to experiment with this stuff you can make some interesting custom colors. I am wanting to try the aluminum with other colors to see what I might create - like red and green. Yellow would be quite an interesting one to mess around with. They sell the paint in half pints and quarts as well as gallons so you can start out small and work up to the big stuff after you gain some confidence. I wound up with 6 quarts of this stuff myself which is plenty to use and still have some to do repainting with years down the road.

It has been a blast to find something cheap and have some fun with it - not having to worry about it if I messed something up.

So here's some show & tell:

If you got rust like this on your hood & decklid - it's best to look around for some clean ones. I only got 4 or 5 A-Bodies to work with at the yards this year - but they were good ones and I picked a whole lot of good parts out of them, Thank Goodness











Here is the aluminum paint - the black is simple the regular gloss black




Here is the top after a couple of months seasoning out in the sun. I blended the paint with the bottom of the C Pillar and you can't tell a whole lotta difference.








And here is another hood for it in the workings:








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Only way I am able to tackle a screwed up top....... and it is the hard way!





The black stuff is Rust Inhibitor. It isn't a cure-all, but it helps.....





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How did you apply the paint?

WalMart sells these sprayers for $5 -




Ido most of my painting with this -




Results are not perfect - but I have kept the old wagon since 2002 doing this - so it has been very good for me!


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