Paint????

[TJBONES]

Hi all, anyone do there own painting and if so whats a good brand. I'm about at the halfway point of the body work and will be looking into buying paint . I will be doing the work myself and no i've never painted a car before. I have been doing custom cabinetry for about 27 years now so i'm no stranger to spraying top notch finishes. I'm even kicking around the idea of making a custom wood center console. My wife(Sherry) who's car this will be wants a complete wood dash and center console. If I decide to do this I will post pics of the whole process. But back to paint any ideas??

[mdrburchette]

We like using BASF products on our special cars.

[baltobernie]

Just as in cabinet-making, the actual spraying of the finished product represents a small fraction of the time and expense of the project. Unless you are planning on painting more than one car, why not do all the bodywork and prep, and let a pro shoot it? Urethane paint is quite toxic and incredibly expensive, two more good reasons to let somebody else do it. You'll get all the satisfaction and probably all the savings of DIY, but with much better results. I spent maybe 100 hours before and after spraying my car, and a painter charged me 5 hours ($300) to prime and paint the whole car. $300 vs. $5000 is an easy decision. Plus, you get to watch!

[azruss]

agreed! painting a car has little relationship to shooting cabinets. The new HVLP guns are a trick and if you dont get it right, you have lots of wetsanding to do.
I have been doing my own bodywork and priming. Using Northstar epoxy primer. very happy with the stuff. tough as nails, lays down easy, sands great, durable. I have parts exposed to the weather for a year and a half with no deteriorization. I am using ppg for color and Matrix for the clearcoat. I have only colorcoated the door edges so far and those came out plenty good. I built a booth. (an open ended booth like most cabinet shops have isnt good enough for a car). I have painted hundreds of cars and have decided to have a pro do the outside. I will shoot all the interior stuff (under hood and trunk, gas cap lid). Prep is the secret to a good paint job. everything smooth and flat down to 400g wet/dry. unlike wood which is porous, with metal and primer, if it isnt sanded, it wont stick. You can definitely save money doing it yourself as long as you dont count the hours.

[TJBONES]

I agree with the both of you but let me clear a few things up. I have a heated spray booth i am not limited to spraying just wood. I've sprayed plenty of metal but never a car. The booth is only used when i spray high gloss lacquer Paint, alot of the high end jobs i do( and this kills me cause i love the beauty of wood ) customers pick a beautiful wood and than ask me to paint it high gloss black or red even when i tell them they can save a boat load of $$$ if i just use MDF and i warn them that after a year of exspansion and contraction that the joints will pop and or crack. They don't care and pay me a tidy sum of money to get the look they want. So i will have to disagree with the comparison of wood to metal infact its much easier to paint metal than wood. I'm talking ofcourse high gloss paint. When you paint any material high gloss the prep is the hardest part of the job if you want the final product to be flawless. Wood is alot softer than metal one slip with the sander and you cant just slap some body filler on and your back in business. With wood if you see a knick or deep scratch your limited to some water and a iron and alot of praying that you can raise that grain and sand it out. So back to the paint just looking for advice for quality auto paint.

[azruss]

Im an old school painter from back in the acrylic enamel days. The modern urethanes do not spray the same. add a HVLP gun and it all goes in the toilet. If you are used to the new paints, you may not have a learning curve. The paints i use were suggested by my paint supply house. a woman and her daughter run the place and neither one paints, but gave me feedback on what their customers liked. The Northstar is not a top of the line epoxy primer but i can find no fault with the stuff. I have shot it enough times to have my technique dialed in. I went top tier with the PPG color. they told me that some of their customers had issues with transparency with lesser quality colors, especially in black. Also if you are painting a new style metalic or pearl, the more expensive brands have more "pop". I havent shot color for over a year now with lot of priming in between, so i am anxious to try it again with some refined technique and gun setting.
The picture below was my first try at HVLP. the clearcoat is laked on pretty good. What you see is raw finish...nothing has been color sanded. the primer was sanded with 320g disc paper. (dry). Paint booth is plastic sheets with a 3000cfm squirrel cage fan with a professional paint filter stapled to the opening. Fan is a blower, so the booth is inflated. does a pretty good job at keeping the dust out.
The matrix urethane clearcoat uses no reducer. Did have a painter i met suggest just a splash of reducer will give the clearcoat better flow. I tried it and didnt notice any difference. Maybe would work if i shot lighter coats.

[TJBONES]

Thanks for the info and pics. I switched to hvlp couple of years ago it was a learning curve. I use fuji turbine hvlp sprayer and after i got dialed in with this machine i have to say WOW its Awesome. I'm looking foreward to spraying the spider but i will not rush the prep stage as this will always bite you in the butt.

[TJBONES]

My biggest hurdle(due to lack of experience in this area) would be the color sanding any tips what grit paper, is this done wet or dry, by hand or DA. Also clear coat does it have to be sanded then buffed out or as i always say if it looks good and feels good leave it alone. I'm no rookie to spraying just spraying a car. Taking the car to be sprayed by a pro is a great idea but doing the work yourself is priceless.

[baltobernie]

We used PPG DP48LF epoxy primer (white) for use with a light hue topcoat, which does not require sanding between coats or before color. PPG Deltron "Concept" urethane, not clearcoated. The shop likes it because you can do the entire car with this, and clear only the exterior if you want.

Having recommended PPG, I'd suggest first visiting the supply shops closest to you, and buy the brand recommended by whom you feel the most comfortable. After all, they will be providing the tech support.

The color sanding is the easiest part of the whole job, presuming of course that you laid down a smooth finish to begin with. Here for the last time will I ask you to consider a pro do this. Paint, reducer and hardener will easily set you back several hundred dollars per quart for pastels, much more for reds, metallics, etc. An extra coat or two learning the intricacies of auto paint will cost much more than a pro's labor for half a day.

Alright, you've decided to DIY regardless. OK. Color sand first with 1500, then 2000. Use a wet household sink sponge between your hand and the paper, to minimize finger grooving. Use care near edges, etc., ... all the things you're now doing painting cabinets. Finish with 3M Perfect-It system. Good luck, and take plenty of photos for us!

[azruss]

most of my information is 2nd hand.
color sanding is not required. It is my take that most guys cant lay down paint good enough to leave alone. The LP gun contributes greatly to this problem. I get the feeling the modern painter expects to color sand, so paint accordingly. (ie, medium dry coats with very tight orange peel...like almost dusty. no attempt to shoot a full gloss coat). I see cars running around with what looks like a semi-gloss and assume they havent been blocked out yet. I asked one painter about leaving the paint to cure and he said it gets too hard to polish out so needs to be done right away. I know with the old enamels, the longer you left them, the more durable the paint. I would wait a year before i messed with these old paints. that included waxing. All the guys i've watched wet sand by hand and basically knock the tops off the orange peel. I've also seen guys doing a lot of repaint because they got too agressive on the corner. If it were me, i would lay down plenty of clear as a cushion. from what i read, you do 600.1000, 1200, compound, polish. I see you can buy DA paper in those kind of grits, so my guess is there are many that use a DA to color sand.
I understand the satisfaction of doing your own painting. The main reason i am farming mine out is because i'm in year 5 on this project and i'm ready to stop working and get driving. A shop will do in a week what would take me months.

[meangreenspider]

I have been doing research on painting my own car for several months now. I have watched many videos, talked to painters and been to bodyshops to watch them paint. It's not that I can't afford a professional paint job but I have always wanted to learn to paint myself and I find it very rewarding doing as much work myself as possible. So why not on a low cost project like my latest Fiat X 1/9. After any body work is complete I will spray 1 coat of primer and block sand outside in sunlight to find any imperfections. I will then clean suface, re-mask and lay on 2 layers of primer. I will dry sand with 320 or 400, clean and re-mask. I will lay on 3-4 coats of basecoat depending on coverage, then 3-4 coats of clear. Wet sand with 600 and 1000 then polish and buff in the different stages. I don't expect to get a true professional quality paint job but I also can't see putting a $3k paint job on a $3k car.

Every painter I spoke to had different advice and preferred different a type of paint. I will be buying a paint kit online that includes everything required except paint gun. I will be using a devilbiss hvlp gun with changeable tips.

What's the worst thing that can happen? At the very least I will have fun working on the car with my 70 yr old father and 17 yr old son and what's better than that. Here is a link to progress.

http://s821.photobucket.com/albums/zz14 ... iat%20X19/

[TJBONES]

[TJBONES]

Is it standard practice to fill this seam if yes are you using body filler or ???

[baltobernie]

Prime and paint what you've got there. If you fill it, it will crack along that "fault line" sometime later.

[blurple124]

I have to ask, because I am planning on painting my own car at some point as well, what kit did you use?

Is that one of the kits from http://www.paintforcars.com?

This caught my eye.

http://www.paintforcars.com/kits_starfi ... tblue.html