The problem is confined to the hood and roof. I plan to paint the area of the roof rack an off white. The hood I want to repaint the original color. I'll be doing the job with spray cans, so I'm not expecting a factory finish. I just want it to look better than it does now, and to prevent rust.
I can't find the paint code info on any tag on the vehicle. There is one other number in the driver's door tag who purpose is not obvious: "MDH
051217 777". Is that a paint code? If not, how do I know what color to buy to match the original paint?
Also, should the factory primer be sanded off to bare metal?
The paint code is located on the vehicle equipment information plate, which is under the hood. Usually it is located atop the radiator support panel, but sometimes it is located under the windshield cowl, which must be removed in order to view the plate.
The door tag is the Vehicle Safety Compliance Label, and will tell you only which country's safety regulations the van meets, and when and where it was built.
No, that is the Month-Day-Hour code for when the van was built.
Consider taking the car to Maaco. You could prep it yourself. Back when I was a lad, I took all the chrome off my 71 Dart Swinger, sanded the worse areas and took it to Maaco. Car came out very nice. Unfortuantely, I lived in Rochester NY so after a couple of years the rust returned but in a decent climate I suspect it would have done quite well. Prep work is the key and you can do a bunch yourself.
Tony...Tony...TONY !!!...With all the hard work your going to go to to paint this thing...DONT paint it with spray bomb paint! It dont matter how good you are...it will look like crap! They all do.
I wonder why you are even bothering to paint it. I've seen lots of cars with delamination and the primer protects them from rust. At least adequate for Raleigh NC. And a buddy in Virginia had a jeep with the same problem and just left it alone. Jeep had about 175k miles on it I believe. No rust.
The roof has a half dozen palm sized patches of rust between the ribs of the roof rack. I'd hate to see it rust through and start leaking. It is a decent vehicle otherwise. 100,000 miles, but it is the LE model and someone took very good care of it. The inside is in very good condition.
I'm tempted, but I seriously doubt if my first use of a real spray gun would yield noticeably better results than a spray can. If I went that route, I'd likely take Art's suggestion and do most of the prep work myself and then pay a body shop to just spray it.
Definitely worth doing if the van has been taken care of. My wife and I bought a '90 Voyager a year and a half ago for $400. The van now has 325,000 miles on it. The trans slips occasionally and the top end's noisy (they all are), but it starts and runs great. Point is, if the van was taken care of as well as you purport, you'll likely get a *lot* of miles out of it.
I also had the paint fall off. The roof was especially bad, and like yours, there was some rust. Plastikote makes the little spray cans and touch-up cans that work quite well if you take the time to mask off all the chrome and glass nicely. It is a little expensive, like $8.00 for a small (less than 8 oz, I think) spraycan. In my case, I found a can of Rustoleum that was kind of close and much cheaper and did the roof in that. Since the roof is out of direct view, it works well enough. Then I blended into the Plastikote forward of the roof rack. The sides I did using the Plastikote. One word of warning: if the paint is peeling off, you'll have to strip it all off and paint the hood entirely or else it will simply peel where you didn't strip--very frustrating. As far as the codes go, when you go into the auto parts store there'll be a book in which you can look up the year, make and model and find all the colors available that year. From this pool you can easily find your color.
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