Painting the skunk stipe on SC

[85shelbycharger]

Hey guys, I am going to be painting my SC hopefully this week. I am trying to figure out how I am going to paint the stripe onto my car. Positive Impressions does not offer the factory style pin stripe that goes around the large skunk stripe, so I want to know how I am going to make this work.

First off, does anybody have a factory pin stripe kit for a garnett/silver car they want to sell? This would be ideal and make my life a hell of a lot easier.

Other than that, what recommendations do any of you have for painting the stripe on and having it come out looking good (not crooked or wavy or anything)?

Please let me know as I reaaallly want to get this finished this week.

Thanks.

[GLHS592]

MEASURE your stripe before you start taking off the old paint. I had the reprinted factory blueprints from Positive Impressions and they are wrong. We laid out the roof stripe according to the blueprints and it was obviously off bad. Luckily, I had my parts car sitting out back to measure.

The factory stripes were for ease of manufacturing. They do not look good. They look even worse when compared to a car that has them painted on.

We used 0.25" fine line tape to lay out the stripe. We laid down three strips next to each other and peeled up the middle one. We did that to space them correctly. When you make the contour on one side of the nose, you will want to trace it onto a piece of paper, cut it out, and lay down the other side according to that template. Do the same for the hatch. Make sure you scuff the area to be painted.

It took us from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM to do this one Saturday.

[black86glhs]

Hey Pat, can you get Chip Foose to stop by and lay it out????:D

[jaysshelby]

Have to agree with Kevin. Painting them on looks ten times better. It took me a couple hours to lay mine out to measure and get everything straight and I did not put the small outer stripe on like Kevin.

[85shelbycharger]

Thanks for the replies guys. So the PI blueprints are no good huh? Luckily I have that silver/blue SC sitting in the driveway I can take all of the measurements from. Ugh, I'm not looking forward to this now :( Any of you want to come and help? haha

[GLHS592]

The PI blueprints are a good reference, but don't take them as the gospel.

[shelbydave]

I was measuring the skunk stripe to campare to the PI diagrams, and I noticed that the stripe is all over the place in it's width. At the fromt of the hood, it was 30 1/4", At the back of the roof, it was only 29", then on the spoiler it was close to 31". It seems to be all over the place. Did you notice this and paint it accordingly, or was the stripe the same width front to back (which is what I expected to find)??

[85shelbycharger]

I ended up using my silver/blue SC as a template (it's got original paint) and suprisingly, the stripe measurements (width-wise) were different from front to back. The spoiler and hatch (under the spoiler where the badges go and the stripe curves) was about 2-3" wider than the rest of the car. So maybe the PI diagrams are right?

[shelbydave]

I think they're pretty close from what I measured. Last night I measured to the stripe tape, and was almost dead on. I think the problem is that you can't go by that for painting the stripe. I think it would be good to follow if the original tape were available.
Anyhow, thanks for the clarification. I expected that stripe to be the same width front to back, and was a little confused to find that it wasn't so.

[GLHS592]

So maybe the PI diagrams are right?

PI's blueprints are a direct copy of the factory original blueprints. They are right in some measurements and wrong in others. If I recall correctly, the hood measurements were close if not right on. The roof measurements were way off. We actually laid out the roof stripe according to the blueprints and stood back to look at it. It looked totally wrong. It was off bad. I went out back to measure them on my old parts car with factory paint. It was way off from the blueprints. We did notice that the stripe was different widths when measuring the parts car.

You'd be much better off using a factory original car as reference.