painting the bottom of my cougar - what color?

Cougar Community Classic Cougar Paint and Body
1

Looking for suggestions here
I am planning on putting POR-15 on the bottom of my cougar’s unibody. I was initially planning on putting matte black on the bottom, but I’ve talked to some folks that thought gray would be the better choice.

So I’d like to ask you all for your opinions.

Here are the choices I’ve boiled them down to:
Chassis Coat Black - satiny semi-gloss
Black Coat - gloss
Gray

Thanks for your responses. Also, if you can tell me what the original color was, that would be great too. I’m guessing the original is black, but I can’t tell on mine.

2

I went with the original scheme: slop grey with undercoating over that. Most if not all Dearborn cars were slop grey. San Jose sometimes used red oxide I understand. If you carefully scrape away or otherwise remove a bit of undercoating you should be able to find out what was used.

3

6.5, I think it varies on what the original color was on the bottom. My car had undercoating when I bought it and years later I removed most of it (when I got tired from removing it, I said that’s enough, LOL) and then sprayed it with rubberized undercoating. When I had the car chemically stripped, it removed about 95% IMO and when the rest was scraped off, the bottom of my car was black. I have seen pics of another '68 and it had red oxide on the bottom with over spray of the exterior paint. John

4

Eastwood’s chassis black looks really nice and is easy to keep clean. Unless originality is your goal, that would be my preference. I’d avoid using undercoating. Eventually, it hardens, shrinks, and pulls away from the metal, creating a nice cozy hiding place for moisture and rust. Before long all that’s left is the undercoating. With paint, at least if something starts to rust, you can see it right away and fix it before it causes any damage.

5

^^^What he said^^^

Actually, I use a black epoxy etching primer, followed by either ‘chassis black’ or good old PPG DAR 9000 black solid acrylic enamel with a bit of flattening agent.

6

What Jody and 'rrcj said…did mine with epoxy primer, followed by POR15 chassis black…but I wasn’t going for “factory”, so, YMMV…

7

What brand of epoxy primer black did you use?

And why didn’t you use the prescribed POR-15 products? I believe they recommend in order

  1. Marine Clean
  2. Metal Etch
  3. POR-15


    I assume the epoxy primer does the same as the metal etch, but I’m curious as to why you went that way instead of what is recommended by the POR-15 folks

and for anyone wondering, I’m not going for original. I’m going for rustproofing and a good look.

8

Dunno the brand on the epoxy primer, metal repair facility did it after being blasted(that lil tidbit should answer the ? on not using the marine clean, then metal etch…) LOL. Had it blasted down to bare metal, shop sprayed the epoxy, I did the POR15 when it got home. I could probably pull the receipt and see what kind of epoxy they charged me for, if you’d like?

9

That’s the procedure when using POR-15 rust preventive paint as the base coat.
The chassiscoat can be applied over bare or painted surfaces.
I would use the POR-15 rust preventive paint then top coat with the chassiscoat.

I used some of the rust preventive on my 55 probably 15 years ago.
Still no sign of the rust coming back.
Seems to be pretty good stuff.

10

I use one of the PPG epoxy primers DP90 is black, and DP40 is gray/green. Lots of colors available. Now they have switched to a lead-free formulation, so the designations have LF at the end - i.e. DP90LF

11

Some of guys in this area are using black expoxy primer from southern poly uerthanes. According to one of my buddies its half the price and shoots as good as the high end brands.