Well, I bit the bullet and decided to try my hand at repainting Gideon, my poor battered 201-2. We've gotten past the easy parts, stripping off the paint and priming him for the paint, but there's still a lot of work to be done!
The Stripping:
Gideon with the paint I'm planning on using.
It's really amazing--the paint stripper got on a little bit of his serial number, and took the 'brassy' color right off it! I wonder what it was... Unfortunately I wound up having to remove the rest of the brassy color on the serial number, but does anyone know if that's normal?
A little rust popped up when I was wiping him down... Good thing I'm using Rustoleum!
Much as I loved the flavor of the signatures that were scrawled into his finish, I'm glad they didn't go all the way through to the metal. I don't have the materials to sand him that smooth!
The Priming:
All primed and ready to go!
Forgot to cover his model number and serial number... Luckily I was able to clean them off with a quick application of paint remover!
Managed to miss his underside completely. D'oh! I'll just prime it quickly before I apply the black; in theory that won't hurt him one bit!
Everything went on very smoothly. While it's not going to be a perfect job (as I wasn't able to remove all the paint), I think he'll look much much better than he did when I got him. At the very least this paint job will be enough to protect him and make him pretty until I have the money to take him to an autobody shop to be professionally repainted!
I'll update this post when I do the black sometime either this week or this weekend--depends on how the weather holds up!