Advice on fixing small paint problems (without a full re-paint!)

[MikeM]

OK, I need some advice from the pros on here . . . My '66 has a couple areas where I need to fix the paint. I'm not talking about scratches . . . these are spots about the size of a playing card, where the paint has cracked and flaked away, and the exposed metal underneath has some light rust.

What I think happened, is this car was re-painted sometime while it was still in Arizona, by someone who didn't do the proper surface prep, and then the desert sun caused bubbling. The spots in question are places where the "bubble" cracked and the loose paint flaked away. (There are a couple of bubbles in other areas, smaller ones, that haven't "popped" yet.)

Eventually I will re-paint the entire car; but I don't have the $$ for that now. So, for now, I'd like to fix this in an inexpensive way myself, so that I can take the car places without being totally embarrassed.

I don't want to just rattle-can primer over them to prevent rust; I want it to look OK. It doesn't need to be perfect, but I want to be able to wash & wax the car afterwards so that it looks "decent" - and of course I don't want the rust to spread anymore.

I'm familiar with the toothpick method for small paint chips, but this is obviously going to require much more than that. But as I said, I don't want to repaint the whole car, or even large areas of the car - I just want to fix the spots with the defects for now.

I have a couple of open weekends coming up soon, so I'd like to read up on how to do it. Can anyone point me to a good article on how to do this? Or has anyone done such a repair? Any advice would be most appreciated!

[JoeliusZ28]

Not really possible...

I'd do the $50 rustoleum paint job, it can actually turn out pretty well if you take your time!

[mcalus]

This^

There aren't many ways you am cut comers when it comes to paint work. Only way you could do it was break it off at a body line but even then the amount of prep, masking and materials you'll use it's still going to be time consuming and costly.

Start saving for a full repaint.

[hoogiesngrinderz]

Without properly blending...yeah, not worth the effort/investment. Save those pennies. A lot of them

[WMCCjames]

Sand everything smooth, seal it then wrap it. Still gonna run you $1500 just for material.

[farmington]

I've done spot repairs in the past. IF you can get some spray paint that matches 99% it can actually come out rather well. Problem being how faded is your paint now and is it a factory color. You can get a quart of paint mixed and put into spray cans.