How did they paint two-tone buses?

[Thompson2]

I am a whopping 6 days into bus ownership, so feel free to slag me for stupid newbie questions.. hopefully I'll eventually be a contributing member of the community.

I have a '63 subhatch flipseat that was originally blue white / turkis and I noticed something odd on the passengers side headlight bucket in the cab. It was obviously used as a foot rest for many years because they wore completely through the paint. This exposed the various layers of paint and it looks like there is bare metal, primer, turkis, then blue white.

So does this mean they painted the entire bus the lower color then painted it again where ever it was supposed to be the top color?

And when people do full resprays, do they do the same thing or mask between the two colors?

Here's a pic of the bucket, for reference.

[matthew henricks]

If my memory serves me they did paint the whole but the base color and then paint over that for the top color.

When i did my bus i was going to do the same but the amount of additional paint i would have had to buy made me think twice. (SWR is expensive) Also being an amateur painter i always considered myself lucky when my paint job wend down smooth so why tempt fate and do it twice...

[Thompson2]

Yeah, I was thinking it'd be a lot more expensive to double paint. But maybe not in a production environment.

And I just noticed -- is that mouse grey between the primer and turkis? Somebody changed there mind mid-build on it?

[Enkiel]

i have the same combo (flipseat turquoise over blue white), and you can see how the bus was painted based on what's left of my OG paint :

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1964 Turkis Flipseat

[Thompson2]

[Eric&Barb]

Earlier ones were opposite.

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=673157&highlight=two+tone+paint
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[Lind]

[EmpiGT]

The two different greys you are seeing is a primer base then a darker grey sealer.

[Enkiel]

[Thompson2]

[Thompson2]

[EmpiGT]

[Cebu]

I had my 67' painted recently. After the body work and primer the lower section was painted then the upper. You can see photos at my blog.

http://vdubuslife.com/blog/?paged=4
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1967 Microbus, 1967 Panel Bus.
"All I need are big dreams and open highways"

[Thompson2]

[Spezialist]

I’m sure the labor to apply the second color was more spendy than the actual color.
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[VWAdam]

[iamdonquixote]

anyone have any pictures of how they masked to paint the second color?

[Dave Becker]

Probably like this?

Wearing some great masks there...............Sorry
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[Thompson2]

[Cebu]

Thank you. The bottom is paint code titian red. When I had the original upper white color made it looked too dark for my liking so I went with another color called "cool vanilla" from the Matrix Paint System. I recommend spraying a sample on a flat piece of metal and stand outside in the sun to see if the color is what you really want. I went through 6 tries before I got the "white" I wanted. The red was dead on what I was looking for.