The industry standard for complete rotisserie restorations includes painting the entire tub body color. 90% of the restored Bugeyes that you see have an underside color that matches the top-side color. This is how we generally prepare our Concours gold level cars, and, per the national concours judging standards, we’ve never had any point deductions for a color-matched underside.
There is, however, a group of people that believe that Bugeye bottoms should always be brown.
Way back when, these tubs were stamped in the body stamping factory (called Pressed Steel, I believe), they were primed while there. Then, the tubs were shipped back to the assembly factory for paint. When the tubs were painted green, white, blue, red yellow or beige, the inside of the boot was not re-painted and remained brown. We know this because the boots are seldom disturbed, and are a great time capsule. But what about the underside of the tubs?
The particular restorer that did the re-painting on Lawton (the car shown in the above video) used this same brown paint on the underside of the floors too… he is of the opinion that all the floors were brown and were not re-sprayed body color when the cars had final paint. He is not alone… others in the Bugeye community share this opinion, and it has long been the subject of debate. The tricky part is, after 65 years of wear, tear, corrosion and oil leakage, it is very tough to know what is correct.
We have seen hundreds of cars, and we have never seen a white Bugeye with rust colored floors before. Many have been weathered, so it can be tough to discern. But on white cars in particular, the brown paint would really stand out because of the contrast. I would have to say that my educated opinion is that white cars had white undersides. If you have a very original white car, please send us a picture of the underside of your floors!
We’ll leave this one for the concours committees to debate… as long as the floor is rust free, it’s OK by me!
