Painting underside of front and rear shroud - Original prep and color?

[blueskies]

This question has to do with two projects - a 1957 100-6 BN4 and a 1963 3000 BJ7 - undergoing restoration. I'm working on the front shrouds for both and hope to get around to the rear shrouds soon. Both front shrouds required replacement of the lower front sections and various other welding repairs that are more or less done. All surfaces of the shrouds are now down to bare aluminum.

While virtually everything on the frames and inner bodies of these cars seems to have been painted body color, that does not seem to apply to the underside of the shrouds. The underside of the 1957 front shroud was finished in dull black paint, without primer underneath. I can't say for sure whether that was original paint, but it may have been. The BJ7 front shroud also had black paint on much of the underside, in addition to areas with undercoating and several other colors of paint.

Can anyone tell me how the factory finished the underside of the front (and rear) shrouds? For the front shrouds, I thought of applying an etch primer to help with paint adhesion on the aluminum and following that up with a few coats of low gloss or flat black enamel.

 

[Keoke]

Well

The most common method of detecting the original color of an unrestored car was to check up under the dash and see what color was on the underside of the shroud.
Additionally, a common practice is to paint the body parts off the car.Consequently, both sides were painted at that time.

 

[blueskies]

Thanks for your reply, Keoke. I'm glad that I asked before assuming that the underside should be black.

 

[Top Down Resto]

Im going to say the shrouds were primed in black on the undersides as were some of the smaller body brackets,ect. too, the car was then primed in a reddish color before the main finish color. I have worked on many 3000s and especially the BJ8s which were done this way. The front shroud underneath should have some body color sprayed up from the adjoining super structure painting, the rear shroud was almost totally painted body color, just went and looked at my 65 original BJ8 and was this way. I will be painting the undersides of the shrouds in PPG DP90 (black epoxy primer) as it will adhere to the unsanded aand cleaned bare alum.
hope this helps
Carroll Phillips