Paint protection film
This was a major decision that I went back and forth on several times over a few months. I have paint protection film on another modern car and just love that I don’t worry about rock chips or even swirl marks or light scratching when wiping the car. But it seems most people do not install Paint Protection Film (PPF) on classics, muscle cars, and hot rods. I know for many classics, they need to be as original as possible, so the paint needs to look exactly as it did when the car was built. But my thoughts on this car are a bit different.
First, I’m trying to preserve the paint from this 2016 build as best as possible. When I got the car it had 628 on the odometer. I know it had 595 miles when the previous owner purchased the car. So 95% of the miles were put on by the shop that built the car as well as taking it to all of the car shows around the country between 2016 and 2019. It was trailered to those shows, but in many of them there is some driving involved.
It won’t be a daily driver, but with my last car, a ‘32 Roadster, I put about 6500 miles on it over 9 years of ownership. That’s not a lot of miles, but it’s drastically more than the 628 put on this car in 8 years. I could leave it as is, and drive the wheels off it, but I know it will get chipped and scratched here and there. So there is the possibility of repainting it in a decade or so if it got bad, but that would be pretty expensive to keep the same quality on this build.
If I have the entire body covered in PPF, I could avoid that potential paint job later, but also live more worry free now. The other issue - there are good PPF jobs and some pretty bad ones - you have to find the right shop. This will not be some template kit that gets installed on this one-off custom body, it must be a completely custom job. I spoke with Mick at Mick’s Paint when he was doing the paint repairs. My initial thought was that he would be against PPF since he is a high end paint guy, and would typically want the paint’s original shine to show. To my surprise, when I explained I was going to drive it everywhere, he said go for it. He has worked with a specific shop for a while, and they have done many high dollar cars. So I went to visit the shop and booked the PPF for early January 2025.
The shop will remove all trim in order to do the cleanest PPF install, tucking in as many edges as possible. However, now that I have been pulling apart the car and working on it, I’m familiar with it quite a bit. I pulled off as much trim as possible to make their job easier, so they can concentrate on the PPF and I will carefully put things back on. Here is a list of what I removed:
Headlight trim rings
Exterior mirrors
Door handle pulls (this meant removing the entire interior door panels)
Lincoln emblems on the side panels
Taillights
Frenched trim on the rear quarter panels leading to the taillights
Rear pan mesh grille
Windshield wipers (couldn’t get these off, but the wrap shop was able to)
Trim around rear license plate opening
Trim around gas tank fill opening
As you can see, it does not look pretty. But it’s worth doing it ahead of time. I was tempted to remove the front grille sections, but there are so many bolts up there that it looked pretty complicated, so I decided to leave that in place and they will put the PPF right up to the edge of it.
The shop is American Wrap Company, located in Newbury Park, CA, which luckily is about 20 minutes from my house. Tyler and his team are very meticulous about their wrap jobs, and were very excited to take on the Wicked Shoebox. After driving it there, they removed the leather buckles and the windshield wipers, completely cleaned and clay barred the whole car to prep it for film. Check out the video below of Tyler and Matt installing the PPF on the roof of the car.
I came back to the shop and removed the wheels from each side of the car so the inside of the wheel wells could also have PPF installed. It’s so nice and shiny under there I thought we should try to preserve it as much as possible. Once complete, the windshield was covered in protective film, then the whole body was covered in Xpel Fusion Premium Ceramic coating. She’s now ready to drive on the road everywhere!
