Underside tub paint?

I am restoring a 61 cj5, I noticed in the pictures the inside of the jeep (tub) is the same color as the outside. The inside of mine is a different color, should it all be the same color?

 

Re: windshield question

Yes., the underside of the tub, engine compartment and fender wells, all body color.

 

Re: windshield question

AFAIK Jeep did not paint the underside in body color. All of my Jeeps have been primer gray (more like a yellowish green-gray) on the underside, with body color above. This says to me that they primer the tubs all over, then set them on the line, and shoot the body color without turning the body over. Firewall, kick panels, inside and outside were all body color - everywhere they could reach without flipping the body over.

 

timgr is correct. I have just finished stripping the original factory paint from a '57. The color was a red/brown primer, and the body color was only on the areas he described. The areas that are hard to reach, under the cowl, back of side body panels had a minimal amount of body color paint on them. On mine the underside primer is very thick with lots of runs. I plan on repainting using the same method.

 

I have to disagree with that. My 64 cj5 has the original paint
underneath, engine compartment, inside the cab on the inner walls
and the rear floor, and wheelwells.
It has had undercoating applied on the underside and in the bed floor
at some point early on. The old undercoating is peeling off, and factory
color is still in good shape underneath..

 

on my 63 the wheelwells were painted but i cant tell about the underside.
i think it may have been whatever the guy could reach got sprayed?

 

My 65 has original red paint underneath as well.

 

My '70 had body color on the firewall that extended into a good deal of the area under the driver/pass floor pans, but the bottom of the rear cargo area was mostly an off-white or light gray colored primer.

 

My 74 was not painted underneath, just primer. The wheelwells and firewall were body color, but the tub was obviously painted while already mounted on the chassis, as any hard to reach spots did not receive body color. I've stripped it to bare metal, so I can verify what was original paint and what wasn't and I guarantee you that the underside was never painted with body color paint.

 

I see quite a dichotomy in the replies here.
My '69 had the underside definitely body color (spruce tip green).
As an aside, it was Canadian production. Maybe we could relate underside painted/not painted to production places or dates?
It seems that things changed from different production facility or changed over time.

Don

 

It could be different at different production facilities. Or in different eras.

But I suspect it's about the materials. The earlier Jeeps may have been shot with an etch and then a conventional primer. In that case, the bottom would have to be topcoated for weather protection.

If an epoxy primer was available for the tubs, the epoxy primer is weatherproof and does not need to be top coated. Don't know when epoxy primers became widely available, but the primer that Jeep used looks like an epoxy primer to me, not a high-build primer.

The old red primer may be red lead (lead tetroxide), and may have been phased out due to toxicity. Obvious cautions apply.

 

My '71 RII has original paint and it's entirely orange from forward to aft, top to bottom.

 

I was just doing some work on mine yesterday. My tub is off and I'm stripping it to bare metal for a complete restoration. Most definitely the bottom was never painted. It had color under the wheel wells, but immediately under the floor sections was just primer. As Tim stated, it was sort of an eggshell blue-ish color primer, and my Jeep was originally Fairway Green Poly, so the difference is very apparent.

But here's a question I'm pondering: My Jeep was fully undercoated sometime very early in its life. I'm assuming at the dealership before it was sold. Is it possible that Jeeps which received undercoating weren't fully painted underneath? Seems like a logistical problem, but it would save substantially in the cost of paint over a large production run.

Tim, since you seem to be the only one around who actually worked at a Jeep dealer back in the day, do you recall whether undercoating was done at the dealership? And whether it's possible that Jeeps meant to receive undercoating were left in primer underneath? Surely undercoating wasn't done at the factory, was it?

 

Not much call for undercoating in sunny southern California, so I can't comment to that. Don't know if undercoating was on the option list or not. Some dealers really push the dealer-applied rustproofing/undercoating, but they did not where I worked.

Every Jeep that I saw in the '70s was primer underneath. AFAIK all the intermediates came through that way. Even the body parts came through in that same greenish-bluish-gray primer, or black.