This is a twenty five year old Caprice that I have owned since it was a year old. For a MIchigan car it's very solid and I would like to keep it as original as possible. Last summer my wife was washing the car and when she started spraying the car wash soap off, the paint stated flaking off the drivers door. The large mess is the bottom half of the drivers door. I thought that I might have inadvertently sprayed carb cleaner or something on the door while working on another car. However, since then the bubbling has appeared on two other panels no where near the drivers door. This is the original factory lacquer and I have no idea why this happened. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Obviously the spots will have to be stripped and repainted. Blending in will be a challenge.

Looks like oxidation and/or OEM primer failure. GM was experimenting with primers in the 1990s and I had more than a couple of friends have their cars completely repainted on GM's dime when the finishes failed. Usually much quicker than 25 years, though...they were failing within 2-3 years.

In the last saga I sent pictures of the factory original paint falling off in hunks. A baseball sized problem on the door kept chipping as I was trying to feather it out, and ended up a football sized area to be painted. After much clandestine effort on the part of a good friend in a southern state, I managed to get a quart of the original color of lacquer. When I sprayed it a week ago, I got on the manufacturers web site and used their directions for thinning the paint. It has been fifteen years ago or so since I sprayed lacquer. Well, their directions for thinning and my mis-adjustment of the gun made the paint spray like it was coming out an undercoating gun. I thinned the lacquer 25% above their recommendations and re-set the gun and got a decent job on the door and one lower quarter. The quarter in the picture is the one sprayed with overly large droplet spray. My question is, if I re-spray after getting all of the orange peel out, can I expect to get a good glossy finish after cut and buff.? Or do I have to sand all of the new paint off and re-primer and seal. By the way, Dupont epoxy primer first, 2k primer to smooth things out and VelvaSeal before paint worked very well.

just sand smooth to a 600 grit finish and spray, your going to break into the Velva Seal and probably the epoxy but it should be ok. I would put a nice medium coat on first to seal it up, allow good flash times then good wet coats. what's the temp when your spraying and what is the temp range of your thinner? Lacquer sprays best if you slow it way down. lacquer also works best at lower air pressures around 25-40 lbs. with a suction type gun. use just enough air to atomize it good.
Jay D.

Thanks, Jay D. I finished getting the orange peel out this evening. I won't be able to get to it until the week-end now. The temps around 75-80 and we've had real low humidity in this part of Michigan this week. Thanks for the suggestion on spraying. Should come out decently and I'm really pleased with the color match. A couple more small spots have showed up so I'll probably be chasing this for the rest of the summer.

Be sure you are using the correct temp thinner for 80* slower is better
Jay D.

One more quick question for the youngsters who worked with lacquer before the 90's. When I did a car in the eighties, an old timer helped with the painting. It involved a number of coats of coats of primer, sanding between every three coats. Then six coats of lacquer with wet sanding to get rid of all orange peel (guess who did the sanding of course). Then five more coats. It sat for a month, then was wet sanded and buffed. In looking over this Caprice in preparation for color coating, I looked down the side of the car and it has a noticeable orange peel or marbled appearance. I am sure that they didn't color sand and buff these when they came down the line. So, how to apply the color coat of white lacquer to most closely match the original finish still on the car?

So, just to make sure, you are wanting to "dial in" more of a factory orange peel look? Easiest thing would be to switch to a "faster" thinner now so the lacquer kind of hits and locks without much flow. I grew up with auto lacquers and still use lacquers almost daily with furniture. When manufacturing started going overseas in the late 70s we had a lot of factory orange peel to "match" when doing coating repair and blending. We started stocking more faster thinners and dialed our guns up/down more to replicate the peel. Sad to admit but I used keep orange peel samples for different furniture lines back then....

Darrel: Thanks for the reply. That is the question I was asking. I'll give that a shot.

If your trying to match peel. Don't water cut it. Just buff the piss out of it. If the rest of the car has gone flat looking. Buff it while it's still green and soft. It'll flatten out in about a month.