How to Apply Guide Coat for Car Restoration

"Hi! I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods. And we are going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Now, Alex is applying a guide coat. At this point, the car is so close to the right shape, that he needs something to let you know what you've sanded, what you haven't and where the low spots are. So you apply this black spray paint (just any old cheap spray paint will do; they sell expensive guide coat if you want that). There's also a powdered form you can use. It comes in a little bag and you rub it on there. Now, Alex is using a sanding block to knock down the last little bit of that glazing putty that he put on there. Always want to use a block so you end up with smooth surface. And as he's sanding, you can see the black paint disappearing. And he's only going to sand until all of the black paint is off. That was, you know, a guide coat. It tells him how far to sand, so he's removed all the high spots and everything is at the same level. He's sanding at this point with a two-hundred-twenty-grit sand paper. The body filler, you know, the original step, was done with forty-grit up to eighty. The body filler was sanded to one-eighty. The final coat of glazing putty gets sanded to two-twenty and then it goes into the paint booth for primer. And we'll see that next."