My car has a skin condition.

[derekf]

Not too sure how to describe it, so here's a pic:
https://static1.pt-content.com/images/pt/2005/12/roof_excema-1.jpg

Looks like it's peeling all the way down to the metal.

Anyone care to take a guess as to why? Paint is 5 years old. My guess would be lacquer primer never really stuck. I measured one of the flakes; it varied from .030 to .035 thick.

I'm pretty sure that the fix is to strip the entire car down to bare metal (which I'm OK with, the paint sucked anyway) and start with etching or epoxy primer - is there anything else I should do?

[TonyL]

too much zinc in the primer?

[Johnny Blaze]

My uncle has a 55 bel air that did the same. Yeah, I'd stripe it to bare, clean it real good with a degreaser for paint preping, and shoot some primer. I really liked the PPG Epoxy primer I used on my Iroc this year. It acts as a sealer as well.

[toxicz28]

That definitely looks like bad prep. I would strip down to bare metal, and start over.

[Boyd]

Derek, I think you're correct. To me it appears that the surface wasn't prepped correctly and the lacquer primer (which isn't great to begin with) didn't have a good "hold" on the metal. The cold weather we've had the last couple of days contributed also. My guess would be it's a single stage enamel and the sun heated it (because it's black) quickly and caused it to delaminate from the cold metal surface. Enamel doesn't have very good elastic properties. Just my 2cents.

Kevin

[viper11]

hi
looking at the pic it looks like the primer is still on the metal and the paint has seperated from the primer
this happens often, due to many different reasons, usually the primer breaks down and seperates forming a chalky substance or the solvent from the primer evaporates slowly and has no-where to go so it forms a thin void layer under the paint until the surface is disturbed causing your body/paint 'artwork' to happen
hopefully the whole car has done it making it easy to strip hehe
good look jason