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The deed is done: Silent E is painted! While it was in there, I got the cracked windshield replaced. Isn't it shiny?

Yesterday I went to pick up my EV from the paint shop. There were a few minor problems. The biggest problem was the way I was handled.

This weekend and this morning I prepped Silent E for new paint. It's just going to be original color; Eri wanted red, but I think red with bronze jams and brown interior would be nauseating.

The kids helped out, of course. And got in the pictures. This is my first time doing anything of the sort, so I'm nowhere near professional. But the paint guy was pretty happy about it. And so was I.

For my birthday, my brother bought me a paint job. A nearby shop put in a $1400 estimate to eliminate all the dents and dings, then paint everything but the trim in the original color.

This weekend, I tried to remove all the trim, so there wouldn't be any ugly lines where old paint transitioned to new paint. Like everything else in the world, it turned out to be many times more difficult than my initial estimates. I worked part of Saturday and all of Sunday, but I got all the door molding off, as well as the fender trim and bottom edge moldings.

Rust Repair 1

You may remember I fixed a rust spot some time ago. It was on the body, just past the corner, but the corner had a bit of rust, too. I painted both the corner and a rectangular bit of the body. I let Melissa mask off a bit of the corner in the shape of a lightning bolt, and we painted that bit yellow.

As you can see from the picture, the masking was incomplete. But the kids think it looks "more electric", so it's cool.

Two weekends later, I repaired the rest of the rust. To make the job look consistent (as opposed to "black patches"), I painted the portion of the hatch that runs between the two corners. To make it look cool, I painted it black and yellow, like a caution tape.

Read on for the other pictures.