A customer of mine bought this car several months ago with the intentions to have it re-painted. The current color was applied many years ago, from the condition of the surface, it was done cheaply and worn out. There is cracking and shrinking of the under layers, and it was time for a proper paint job.

A bare metal respray starts with a complete disassembly of the car. I started with the doors, and removed the chrome window frames and mechanisms.

From there I moved onto the door sills and part of the interior where I ran into the first of the normal problems in disassembling a car. A few of the sheet metal screws under the door sills were rusted in place. The phillips heads were quickly stripped, so I had to resort to drilling out the screws. These suckers were hard steel! These days, we’re so used to having soft mild steel for sheet metal screws, I was surprised to find these screws resisting my drill bit.

I eventually got them out and will deal with the broken off bit once I get the rest of the interior out of the car.

As I suspected, this car was masked and painted the last time it saw fresh paint. The grey paint under the door panels is what the car was the original color, and we will be going back to this when the car gets painted.

Grigio Fumo, or smoke grey, was the name of the color, without any metallic. It’s an understated color, but I think it’ll look great on this car.

I’ve worked on a couple of cars painted in this color. Both of them were original paint cars.

In bright sun, this color lightens up. This PF Coupe had a blue interior.

This GTE had a light natural leather interior.

I’ll have to research what color the GTC originally came with and help the owner decide what to go with.