Mileage is Only a Number

[songzunhuang]

I purchased our family 1998 V70 new when my daughter was born. It is now her first car.
What does a 263,281 mile car look like? It's been to the moon (another thread for an earlier generation car exists on this site)! Well, I refreshed it last month. Repaired and refinished all the relevant parts in my garage.

Taking off the damaged parts.

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First color coat.

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Some parts refinished on the car.

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Front view

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Rear view

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What was redone?

• Front Bumper

• Rear Bumper

• Rear spoiler

• Tailgate handle

• All four door handles

• Driver front rub strip

• Passenger rear rub strip

• Rear view mirror covers

• Left and right Rear glass trim

This car will exceed 300,000 miles and then some.
What does your high mileage V70 look like?

[erikv11]

Great post, nice work! Car looks great. Our 98 has also racked up almost 300k miles, but in the midwest and is nowhere near as clean as yours.

But it will be living in your area starting this fall. I've been focused on maintenance loose ends the last few weeks, figure I may never see it again so it needs to have the stage zero items in order.

[abscate]

I purchased our family 1998 V70 new when my daughter was born. It is now her first car.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

[MoVolvos]

*
When my brother purchased his new 93 850 4 door I thought the perfect Volvo would be a wagon in that red with gold BBS center and polish lip rims.

I still miss the 98 S70 T5. The 2.3 was just more unique sounding than the other 5's. I also like the 98 transmission. Rock solid. Nice work in keep the wagon new looking!

*

[BlackBart]

I purchased our family 1998 V70 new when my daughter was born. It is now her first car.
What does a 263,281 mile car look like? It's been to the moon (another thread for an earlier generation car exists on this site)! Well, I refreshed it last month. Repaired and refinished all the relevant parts in my garage.

Very nice. Are you using a professional spray gun? What was your experience with base-clear-orange peel-sanding?

[songzunhuang]

I purchased our family 1998 V70 new when my daughter was born. It is now her first car.
What does a 263,281 mile car look like? It's been to the moon (another thread for an earlier generation car exists on this site)! Well, I refreshed it last month. Repaired and refinished all the relevant parts in my garage.

Very nice. Are you using a professional spray gun? What was your experience with base-clear-orange peel-sanding?

BlackBart, I use a gun kit from SprayIt that I got from Amazon. It was about $90 at the time and it was the only gun I could find that was LPLV. That is, Low pressure, Low Volume. It can operate at 27-30psi with a 90CFM compressor. I literally used a compressor with only a 2 gal tank. That's normally something used for drywall texturing or a nail gun. You see, I don't have one of those gigantic air tanks for air-tools in my garage. Anyway, the kit comes with 2 gravity feed guns and it works great. I use a 1.7mm tip for primer and a 1.3mm tip for color and clear.

As for paint, I used a Dupont Chromax paint system with a Nason primer. It was recommended by my local auto paintshop in Santa Cruz. I've done my BMW and now my Volvo with it and the system works very well. It is a little pricey. A pint of color for the Volvo was $92. However, you can't just buy color. There's the primer, basecoat (color) and the clearcoat. Then you need all of the catalysts or reducers. The color coat was reduced 1:1 meaning that I got 2 pints of color paint after the reducer. This was just enough to cover the parts I painted. I have enough color left for a touch up bottle and that's about it. All in all, it was a $450 event for all the paint.

My experience was really good. I did sand after the primer coat, but I did not color sand or clear sand at all. I did notice that if I didn't spray enough paint, I would get slight orange peel, but I adjusted. The Cromax paint settles out quite well if you spray a medium coat. One exception was a run that I had to sand out using 800 / 1500 / 3000 before I polished. If you want more details, I know way too much about this now. Let me know via PM and I can fill you in.

Oh, one more thing. I learned that the rear bumper's horizontal surface gets scuffed up fast. So this time, I applied a 3M clear plastic paint protector. The secret to putting this stuff on is soapy water.

3M Paint protector

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This was only $20 on Amazon for a 6" x 60" roll. It was the perfect amount to apply over the bumper. When it's all done, you can hardly tell it there.

Paint protector after install.

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[FireFox31]

That paint work looks amazing. Please post pics of what the repainted areas looked like before the work.

My 200k mi 2000 V70 bumpers look simply abysmal. A body shop wanted around $300 each to professionally repaint them. I'm watching the junk yards for "good enough" replacements for $100.

For future readers, perhaps you should post all the "too much information" that you learned. Replacement bumpers will only get harder to find, so your repainting info will eventually be the only solution.

[songzunhuang]

Firefox31, here are a few "before" pictures.

The rear bumper had bumped into several things. There were areas of paint flaking off, cracks on the top surface, clearcoat failing and numerous scratches. There's also failing clearcoat on the hatch lid handle. You'll have to zoom in to see all the damage.

Look close for all the damage.

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The front had a flap punched into it, failing clearcoat, and more scrapes on the bottom than you can count.
Here's a picture of it in progress. You can see I've used bumper epoxy to close the flap. There would be a little filler later to smooth it all out. The deep scrapes and gouges on the bottom lip is mostly sanded down. It'd get some filler and smoothed out before paint.

Lots of damage after 22 years.

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Here are both bumpers during the process of sanding the paint down to the plastic in lots of spots. Basically if there was a crack in the paint, you had to go down all the way. I used 80 grit, but in retrospect I caused a lot of extra work. It's hard to smooth a plastic surface after 80 grit.

Both bumpers in thee middle of repairs.

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The rear window trim has suffered an attempt to repair with a shaker can. It didn't look good at all after only one year. It's cracking and picking up dirt and getting "milky". Do not waste your time on a spray can. Use quality paint.

Rear window trim looks awful.

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The mirror covers are one of the areas that I have to look at every day and see how the clearcoat is failing. It was one of those minor but so annoying things.

These I have to stare at every time it's driven.

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Anyhow, this gives folks an idea of what I was dealing with. It seems that if it was made of plastic, the paint on it was failing. The metal parts all seem to be ok still. I guess it has to do with the porousness and stability of metal vs. plastic.

[ZionXIX]

Nice work. Makes me want to convert my garage into a paint booth.

[Hobbes74]

Great looking work and I love the car.
I just had all the same parts painted on my 98 R wagon and a headliner replaced before I took delivery of it. So glad it is done but your work is proof that you can do it all at home with some prep and patients.
Do you happen to have the link to the paint gun kit you bought? It sounds perfect for the small jobs I have on my other cars.
Thanks,
Matt