got a couple questions. it seems my 70 442 pace car {originally white from factory} was repainted in 81-82 resale red with some shabby body work. then in the early 90s was repainted back to factory white with even body work and paint. anyway now that car is in the middle of a frame off we can see red overspray on undercoating on bottom of car after scraping off undercoating there is white paint? i thought underside of bodys were black? am i wrong? also under gas tank was white. what do you guys say!

 

You would be right. Before the car left the assembly Olds sprayed the whole bottom of the car with black paint.

IIRC it was to protect the bottom of the car from crud. I read this in an article a while back. There were even schematics for the painters to show where to spray. As you are aware, the body was painted separate from the frame back then. The factory only sprayed the areas they could easily reach and didn't spray anything that got hot - like pipes and mufflers.

The gas tank was never painted and was installed before the bottom spray, so it would be white under the tank. Did you find your build sheet on top of the tank? Thats one of the places they got left.

 

Body color overspray is very typical on Abody cars. Yes, the undersides were painted black but apparently that was prior to the outer body color being sprayed. The "black painting" that Alan MAY BE referring to, IMO, was an additional step not aimed at getting the body underside black (it already was) but to paint over the various bare metal parts that were attached to the car after the bodies were done....rear differentials, various suspension pieces, etc. You can think of this second "black paint" step as the "hide the ugly stuff long enough for the car to get sold" step.

Or, put another way, if you read the '70 Assembly Manual, Section 0, Page 44 you see that the parts they are referring to for painting(and not painting) there are all chassis/frame related...not the body underside itself.

Input I've read on sites like these was GM and the dealers didn't want customers to walk up behind a car or glance under it and see a bunch of rusted new parts....better off to hide them with this black "sales lot" coating.

I've got the same white overspray on one of my cars (original paint) and it's pretty apparent. Amounts of overspray on the body underside vary.....there have been one or two guys either on V8Buick or ROP.com that said they have original cars with heavily-body-colored undersides. It's entirely possible that some plants varied from the others.

I've always said...."who knows....maybe they were training a new painter, maybe they needed to empty a paint pot of a particular color, maybe the paint guy breathed too much paint and went "psychadelic" or got bored and decided that a body colored underside would be cool.

Remember, these were factories with human workers....pretty much anything could have happened.

 

thanks patton, allan

 

Yes, that's the step I read about. I don't know how many people would actually look under a car back then, besides me...