re. Painting a Fender (for Rod (NH))

I have bookmarked your series if photos and explanation of your process to prep and paint a deeply pitted tractor fender. I bookmarked this info some time ago, knowing I would be doing this same process to a set of Farmall fenders that are pitted as badly.

Now, when I access this page ->Link
~thompson/acb/painting/painting2.htm>Link -, I see most of the photos, but numbers 16 - 25 are replaced with a ?. Have these pictures been removed from your page?

I am a novice at patching and painting and could use all the help you have provided in ALL the photos.

Thanks in advance for what you do here,

Those particular ones are also important to show how I dealt with the pits - so it's unfortunate that those are missing for you. If you are on broadband and are in a hurry, I can email those to you as a single zip file (probably about 1mb total) if you want. I'll keep checking into the situation and if it's not corrected in the next day or two, I'll fix it myself. I can always upload those to another server and reconfigure the links on my webpage as needed. That's kind of a pain unless I really have to.

Thanks for letting me know about the problem. Did you just notice this today or has it been like that for some time? I don't usually visit my own pages on a regular basis so I wouldn't have known unless someone said something.

Rod

I appreciated you taking the time to exhibit those photos. i had no idea how much prep, re-prep and re-prep goes into realing doing it right. What was the total amount of elapsed time it took to complete that fender? I do not think i am going to complain anymore when i have to scrub, clean, scrap, dust, prime and paint the old window frames at the country place!

Thanks,
tstex

You really can't go by elapsed time, especially in my case where I paint outside and have to work around the weather. I sandblasted that fender the first part of April. It was too cold at the time to do any painting. That's why I used the Picklex20 - to keep any flash rusting away until I could get to prime it. Normally, when I sandblast a part I will not bother with the Picklex but will epoxy prime immediately - certainly the same day. The temperature stayed cold for most of April and I couldn't do much more until May. During much of May it was either too wet, too cold, too windy or too buggy. I had to pick days that were favorable to painting while also being limited by specific time windows between epoxy and surfacer and between color and clear. It was early June before I completed the fender. If I had been using a heated paint booth, the whole thing could have been done in a few days, even with my part-time, slow work practices. The biggest effort was in dealing with the pitting. It was deeper than I had anticipated the ability of the surfacer to easily correct. I should have used the finishing putty all over instead of just in the worst areas. If I had done that I could have saved several coats of surfacer and some hand sanding with only a little additional power sanding of putty.

Even with a good, heated paint booth however, the preparation is more than 95% of the effort, assuming no disasters during paint application. The actual application of color is measured in minutes. Applying three coats of color to that fender, including the inter-coat flash times, took less than 30 minutes total.

Rod

Thanks - you answered my question. It really comes down that prep work [done with the correct effort]is the majority of the work.

Best Regards,
tstex

Thanks.