How far should I take it?, Removing paint layers and bondo Options

[balljoint]

How much should I take off? There are two layers of paint. On top is a crappy colour change to red, underneath the original orange, and in between there are bits of bondo filling in the odd hole. Once I am done with the chassis repairs (and replacing bondo with metal)I am going to POR what I can and then get her painted.

Whatever method I use, should I take it down to bare metal or just to the original primer and let the paint shop take it from there? What kind of surface should I put on the panels for the easiest paint job?

This car will never be concours, I just want to fix it right and get the best finish job that I can.

[lapuwali]

if you're gonna invest a bunch of your time and money, don't short change yourself. I would hate to spend a couple Gs then next year think "I shoulda..."

If it were the difference between spending $2K and $3K, I might see your point. However, paying someone to do a bare-metal resto v. a respray over factory original paint is more like $5K v $15K. If you're doing all the work yourself, it's about 10x the work to do bare-metal than it is to do "down to factory paint (plus a bit)". The end result would be virtually indistinguishable if both were done properly.

If you're the type that has to do the very best job it's possible to do, then you wouldn't even be asking this question, you'd be stripping everything off and fixing even the stuff the factory didn't do "correctly". If what you really want is a nice-looking car that's as nice as it way the day it rolled onto the transporter in Germany, then, IMHO, you're short-changing yourself by doing all of the extra work.