O-1 convertible paint

[MtnMan67]

i have an 0-1 ragtop that is one of the 67 pacecars  the family has owned it 35 years
my buddy said he saw a magazine recently that said the paint on the pacecars was enamel
my dad and i painted it years ago, it was lacqer. we put lacqer on top of it

sorry, for the bad typeing, im not good on computers.

Marv

[bertfam]

Marv, although you'll get argument over this, and I don't want to speak for the entire CRG membership, but I believe we're all in agreement that the enamel theory just doesn't hold water. I'll let Mark Canning give the details since he's more of an expert than I am, but there would have been a lot of "problems" for Fisher changing from lacquer to enamel and then back to lacquer again.

Ed

[ccargo]

The pace cars in question in the laquer enamal debate are only those built in build week 03C per the cowl tag. We'd appreciate your input here on your experience with the repaint if your car is in that build date?

[MtnMan67]

i see that code on the tag. it is 03C  124677n192xxx
my dad bought it from a friend of his in 71 or 72. been in our family since.

sorry, i even mispelled typing

[ccargo]

It seems you have a festival car there thats very exciting. Hold on for one of the CRG members to gather your tag data in private for confirmation. They will have "CRG Member" in their title. I used to own the very first built festival car N191975 as it is the first assigned GM VIN known of the 43 festival cars and thats all that counts despite other wild theories elsewhere regarding the lowest carb date, carpet date or fisher body number as somehow being relevant in any significant way. I now have an 04A 396 0-1 built 04A that I'm restoring. The festival car I owned is being restored by a friend of mine and retains miuch of its original paint as it recieved only a exterior trim on repaint at one time. A quick sanding test yielded signs of it being laquer based in the opinion of the restoration shop. Other tests will be performed shortly on that subject car and posted here.

[KurtS]

There are a lot of reasons to doubt that any 67-69 Camaros were painted enamel.
Both plants were setup for laquer and a lot is required to switch to enamel. A lot more than 43 regular production cars (the festival pacers) would warrant.
They wanted a good finish on those cars and the last thing they would do is switch to a paint formula that the repair shop and the whole plant was unfamiliar with. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
No less any touch-up at the race would be problematic, esp if only half the pacers got enamel and the other half got laquer.

Marv,
What led you to believe your car was laquer?

[firstgenaddict]

Take enamel reducer, not Lacquer thinnner and see if it softens the paint... even catlyzed enamel will soften with with the reducer, although it may take longer.

[Mark]

What would enamel reducer do to lacquer?  I also find it hard to believe that the first batch of O-1 cars could have been painted in enamel, at least in the normal assembly line due to the different flash times, drying temperatures etc. but the guys over at camaropacecars.com seem to have at  some evidence that at least some of them were.  Now I could never get them to tell me how many of the first batches they have found enamel on, and of those that they do have, they know for sure none have been reapainted.  If I'm GM Im not going to have a batch of cars that are going to be on public display at a very high visibility function get painted with a product the assembly plants are not used to using, just to get a slighlty more durable finish on them.  I was always under the impression that "show cars" made for the last 50 or so years were always painted with lacquer finish anyway due to its ability to be polished to a mirror finish, as well as the ability to put more layers of paint down in a shorter period of time without getting to thick a film thickness.

I guess I'll just have to wait to see what evidence the other site really has.  Then if they really are painted in enamel I'll let them explain how it was done in a plant setup to paint lacquer.

[firstgenaddict]

Nothing... It is what I have always used to take enamel paint off of Lacquer... the whole engine compartment of the 69 RS/Z survivor was painted with black bug bomb and I cleaned all of it off the inner fenders, radiator support, tie bars etc etc, it left all phospahting and orignal paint intact.

I am in agreement with you Mark... I find it VERY difficult to explain a change from Lacquer to Enamel. The show paint jobs of the time were 10-14 coats of Lacquer, color sanded and buffed, they shined like nothing else.

[Mark]

If you use enamel, how long do you need to wait before buffing and polishing?

Plus if enamel was used, you can paint enamel over the lacquer based primer system (don't knw how soon you can do it though) but when it came time to blackout the firewall and other areas that might have enamel overspray on them, you can't use the lacquer based blackout paint.  Your almost forceing the plant to come up with not only the enamel body color paint, but every other paint that was used on the line had to be enamel.  Theres no way that would happen in the plant.  It would almost demand that the cars be painted off line somewhere, but as I understand it, theres no place in the plant where you could put 50 some odd cars so they could be stripped down and completely repainted (or painted) in enamel. 

The assembly plants were paid based on the number of cars produced, so they would not be to keen on spending alot of extra time on these cars.  If it cost them 200 "regular" cars production for a day so they could spend time on these cars, thats probably 3/4 of a million dollars of lost production.  I doubt corporate GM is going to give the assembly plant a check for that amount (or anysignificant amount) for spending time painting cars, when the normal paint (lacquer) used would have been more than adequate.

[firstgenaddict]

You definately can't put Lacquer over enamel , it will lift like no other...

[MtnMan67]

it didn't smell like enamel when we sanded it and we painted it wih lacquer and it went on fine.

[67ModTop]

Hi Marv!

Have you checked your inside rear view mirror yet for any sort of numbers or glue residue?

[Jerry@CHP]

I am just amazed that this lacquer-enamel continues to be an issue on these forums.  GM always used lacquer to paint their vehicles.  When I was writing my first 1967-68 Camaro fact book during the late 1980s, many of the Norwood workers were transferred to the Baltimore plant rather than take a lay off.  I interviewed 10-15 workers at that time, two of them were painters.  Both painters told me that all Camaros were sprayed in lacquer.  Enamel never came up.  And at this time, these cars were only 20 years old so their memories were still very clear.  One of the guys rememebered building the first batches of ZL1 Camaros.  This group of employees were also the ones who told me about the PTB stamps meaning paint, body and trim inspection.  I broke the code on this way back then.  Larry Price (think that was his name) was a quality control person at Norwood and was involved with these processes during the late 1960s.

John Hinckley was there.  And from the knowledge and experience that he had being there in the thick of it all, I can't believe that this Pace Car paint enamel controversy continues to keep going on and on and on.

Jerry   

[Mark]

Not only does it continue but it was recently printed as gospel in Muscle Car Review (I think) in an article about the 67 Pacecars.  The source for the article was the guys over at camaropacecarsdotcom.  I got banned from that site recently, by simply asking how it was possible to paint the cars in enamel, while still building another 850 laquer painted cars on the same day, which they could not answer.