What does it take to strip paint from a rare Corvette?
One of the services we offer at our Milford shop is stripping paint and coatings from rare and vintage vehicles.
Yes, this is in fact a 1954 Corvette. It might not look very pretty right now, but our guys have blasted this beauty down to the gel coat.
Stripping paint and corrosion removal is the just one of the first steps to automotive restoration. With a rare old beauty like this, it might look easy, but it has to be done right.
The Corvette’s body is fiberglass. In blasting, we have to take great care not to remove the gel coat underlayer that protects the composite material. This is old material, so the blasters will go slowly.
We do extensive prep work to every car just to get them ready for blasting.
A private owner brought the ’54 Vette to us to use abrasive blasting to remove the original Pennant Blue. The year 1954 was the second year Corvette was built. Only about 3,600 were manufactured, and experts estimate just 300 had the Pennant Blue paint.
How do we strip paint from a car like this?
Once the owners leave the vehicle with us, we treat it like our own.
Here’s Jose, who has been with us for 20+ years. He takes time to remove and label parts that will be blasted separately or cannot be covered. You can see he carefully seals the interior of the car and areas where we don’t want grit to invade.
Once the car is prepped, the blasters evaluate the surface paint and the condition of the fiberglass to determine the best material (media) to blast with.
In this case, our guys went with Plasti-Grit, supplied to us by our friend Alan at Composition Materials, also in Milford, an international distributor.
Here’s the result:
Our “finished” blasted automobile has a patchy look. That’s because our blasters took great care to remove a layer at a time, until the gel coat was identified. The car may not look as sleek as the finished product will, but this stage is the key to a perfectly smooth finish in the end.
After the blasting is complete, the bare product is stored in a temperature-controlled area to protect it, and returned to the owner, or transported to another shop for finishing.
Do you need paint stripping for your restoration project? Give us a call. We can answer your questions.
American Dry Stripping™ & Powder Coating helps people with all of their sandblasting and media blasting service needs. We are based in Milford, Connecticut and serve customers in metropolitan New York and surrounding counties, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Contact us to learn more.
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