,
This is also the right time to roll fender lips. Rolling fender lips will crack the paint, so do it to the paint that’s about to get sanded off.
Once the car is suitably stripped for painting, it obviously is undrivable, so we had to call AAA to tow us to the body shop. AAA is getting a lot less tolerant of this kind of roadside assistance call, and odds are pretty decent these days that the truck won’t tow you if you don’t look believably broken down. The first truck refused to tow us and we had to call AAA back to get another. Took 4 hours, in the end, to get towed to the body shop, but we made it.
Given how good the results were, I’d really like to be able to recommend the shop that did this, but sadly they’re not really open to the public.
At one point, we were going to have it painted at the Port of Long Beach by one of the guys who touches up cars damaged in shipping. Seemed like a great plan, since that painter was trained by Nissan to match the factory paint jobs, and we were painting the car a factory Nissan color. Sadly, that deal fell through, but we ended up getting it painted by a shop farther down the line that maintained the cars Nissan used for advertising and PR work, so again, they had to do a lot of brand new cars to a very high level.
Another trick to getting a good paint job is to save serious interior work until after the paint job is done. Painting is a dusty, dirty job, and sanding dust inevitably gets everywhere. After the paint job, we got to work on the interior.
The carpets in this 250,000-mile car were as disgusting as you’d expect, so we just let them take the brunt of the body shop dust and then tossed them. Since the interior was torn apart anyway, installing a new carpet seemed like it would be pretty easy. A full carpet kit (not counting the cargo area, which didn’t need replacing) from stockinteriors.com is less than $200. What could possibly go wrong?!
Well, it turns out that price gets you a molded piece of carpet, but it isn’t trimmed, so there’s still a lot of work to be done. In theory you can use the old carpet as a template, but once you have two big, floppy pieces of carpet spread out, you realize it’s hard to be very precise with that method. For the most part, the cuts ended up being made using the car as a guide. Measure twice, cut three or four times…
