A word of advice to anyone wanting to do a car restoration.  Don’t rush your paint and body guy.  You will never forget a bad paint job.  I am convinced that just about anyone can do bad body work, but it is rare to run across an everyday body shop that will even consider taking on a restoration project.  They make a lot more money per hour replacing a fender on a newer car than they ever will doing a total restoration of a 30-year-old muscle car.  Unfortunately the general public will only notice the top 1/64 of an inch of paint and clear coat, but what really counts is the prep work underneath that shell of a paint job.  Unless you can afford to bring your car to a specialty restoration shop, you need to plan on this step taking some time, and almost always longer than you estimated.  My car spent some months at Hooper Enterprises in Oklahoma City.  Buddy Hooper turned out to not only be an amazing paint and body guy, but he turned into a real friend.  I was totally pleased with the work they did no my car.  Ask your paint and body specialist to give you some names of other cars they have done, and go check out their work.  I did, and Buddy Hooper not only gave me the names, he even gave me addresses and phone numbers to call folks and ask if they were happy with the results.  Hope you enjoy the pictures below showing the progress in the body shop.

The first few pictures are of us trying to get the paint matched to the correct color.  The fist picture is of us comparing differnt shades of plum crazy to an original mirror mount off my 1971 plum crazy Challenger.  It was an example of the factory color from 1971.  The next two pictures are of me comparing the paint on the bolt heads from inside the trunk (an area that is not normally faded) to the freshly painted trunk.  I think we matched it pretty well!