Just got the '68 back from the body/paint shop after 8 months. Still need to redo the interior and finish the 451, but I'm taking it tomorrow to Meep-Meep's Missile Base BBQ car show party. I just took this photo tonight, 2 weeks after bringing her back home.
I'm keeping it a Satellite, but I couldn't resist installing a re-pop AMD hood to replace my stock flat hood and have the paint shop stripe it with the '69 RR pattern. I had them do the stripes in gloss black for ease of maintenance. The whole thing and the transition from the black to blue is spot on. With the cut and polish job they did the car turned out really nice.
Being that I'm in California, most of the shops have already gone to water-based paints. I looked for almost a year before I found a quality shop an hour away from me in Santa Cruz that was willing to do the work for a fair price and still could legally shoot solvent based paint. I'm not sure why Santa Cruz still allows it - I would have thought they would have been one of the first to swich! (I priced out 5 places and they were actually the least expensive and the only shop that could do solvent based). The car body tag says it was originally a QQ1 blue paint car (the predecessor to B5 blue), but I've seen a few QQ1 cars as well as the '69/'70 B5 and '71 B5 and I like the '71 B5 the best, so that's what I painted it.
I also installed new re-pop door handles and side mirrors, found an excellent unbroken grill on the cheap to replace my old satellite grill that was a little bent up, installed new front and rear glass from AMD, and rechromed the bumpers. The car originally only had the driver's side mirror, but I bought a re-pop chrysler mirror and had the shop mount it to the passenger side so I can see who's comin' up on me before they get there.
I'll post some more photos next week.
I'm keeping it a Satellite, but I couldn't resist installing a re-pop AMD hood to replace my stock flat hood and have the paint shop stripe it with the '69 RR pattern. I had them do the stripes in gloss black for ease of maintenance. The whole thing and the transition from the black to blue is spot on. With the cut and polish job they did the car turned out really nice.
Being that I'm in California, most of the shops have already gone to water-based paints. I looked for almost a year before I found a quality shop an hour away from me in Santa Cruz that was willing to do the work for a fair price and still could legally shoot solvent based paint. I'm not sure why Santa Cruz still allows it - I would have thought they would have been one of the first to swich! (I priced out 5 places and they were actually the least expensive and the only shop that could do solvent based). The car body tag says it was originally a QQ1 blue paint car (the predecessor to B5 blue), but I've seen a few QQ1 cars as well as the '69/'70 B5 and '71 B5 and I like the '71 B5 the best, so that's what I painted it.
I also installed new re-pop door handles and side mirrors, found an excellent unbroken grill on the cheap to replace my old satellite grill that was a little bent up, installed new front and rear glass from AMD, and rechromed the bumpers. The car originally only had the driver's side mirror, but I bought a re-pop chrysler mirror and had the shop mount it to the passenger side so I can see who's comin' up on me before they get there.
I'll post some more photos next week.
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