Do-It-Yourself Flame Job

Painting Flames on The Road Warriors'
'71 Suburban

Here is the victim - my brothers cool-ass '71 Burb. He has spent the past several months and several G's dialing up the drive train with a 350 crate motor. And, this past Thanksgiving, he came down to So. Cal to have me flame his ride. We did it all in the afternoon on friday while the ladies were out shopping.

Now, you must know, I am not a professional car painter. Back in the early 80's I sprayed my red primer '67 Galaxie Convertible all primer black leaving the red primer in the front with flames. This was the mullet of paint jobs.

Not that this is my only experience. Back then, when my room-mate was on vacation, I bought a dozen spray cans of black primer and did his 66 Lemans. And, not only that, but I painted my brother's lawn sprinkler all up in flames too. It was this old cast-iron tractor lookin thing that you hook up your hose in the back and when you turn on the water it powered the wheels slowly crawlin the lawn while the "bull-horn" sprinklers spun around and watered the lawn. In that case I painted it with acrylic paints that I use in my fine art and coated it with several coats of clear gloss spray. It looked fast.

So if you got a black primer piece of shit that you want to dress up follow these simple instructions and hopefully you will be inspired to make a day of it.

I transferred the marker drawn flame design from the butcher paper by tracing white chalk on the back of the paper and layed it down on the black primer hood in position. Then I pressed the design on the hood leaving a trace of the flames. I had to go back on the hood with the chalk to fully outline the flames.

Then we layed down masking tape over the flames. With a thin tape layer, we were able to see the white chalk flames underneath. With a sharp X-Acto knife carefully cut the masking tape without cutting into the paint and metal. Here you see Billy adding more tape and paper to completely mask-off areas we did not want as copper.

With the areas we did not want painted all masked off we started to paint the flames. Nick wanted his joint to get some attention so he bought 4 cans of copper metallic spray paint.

With this new flame-job the ride would pass traffic so we needed something for them to remember us by, so we added a touch of flame around the rear deck key-hole. Notice too the advertising for Car-Shows.com and Bike-Shows.com

Here are the two brothers lifting the tape to reveal the bitchen flames underneath. That's me in the foreground and Nick takin' the tape off the hood.

We did all of this in the alley behind the World Headquarters of Car-Shows.com.

Billy is taking the tape off the passenger side while I wipe off all the overspray and lightly rub the copper paint to even out the spray lines.

Another shot of the "pain-in-the-ass" tape removal.

Dusk was falling as we finished the job. We finished off the paint job with a black paint pen pinstripe. You can get the paint pen at any art supply store.

This is the Money-Shot! I drew a Chevy bowtie in the middle of the circle on the front of the hood.

This shot shows the black pin around the flames on the door. We were losing light and a bit of braincells with the fumes and stuff.