Quote:

Adam, that sure is a very nice shine. So if I understand, you didn't sand between coats, but put all the coats on and then sanded at the very end only? How many coats did you do total?

I would be worried that a dog hair or dust speck would get trapped on there during coat 1, and there would be several coats over it, then I'm not sure if it would wetsand out or if it would be stuck under there.. did you have any stuff falling in it throughout the coats?


hi exit, sorry, my name's not adam. although i see why you're confused. i think i only did 5 coats overall and i didn't get full coverage on the metal. there are spots that are showing through. but for me, the test panel was more to see how much shine i could get out of that paint and how hard it would be. i know when i do it for real i'll do enough to get full coverage of the surface. i didn't get too much debris in the paint but after sanding i didn't uncover some specks.

but again, this wasn't meant to be a test of coverage. i'd follow the steps properly as laid out earlier just to save myself the trouble of sanding out crap in the end. i really just wanted to see how this paint surface would stand color sanding and see how much gloss could be had. i know some people were concerned about gloss and my logic was that most paints can have the same amount of gloss as others as long as the color sanding step is done properly.

when i painted my previous tank with krylon it looks like complete crap but i knew i could wetsand and polish out the imperfections. where i messed up was laying on too many coats too fast so the paint didn't have time to cure properly before i put on other layers. i'm naturally impatient that way. when i finished polishing out that krylon tank and fenders (painted black) it was a mirror.

so i was just curious to see if regular ole rustoleum (or xo rust or whatever) could be polished to a nice shine. i'm convinced that i can be and if the surface prep and the color sanding steps are done properly a paint job using this method would be virtually indistinguishable from a pro-shot paintjob. and in many cases, if you do those steps effectively, it could look much better than 95% of the professionally shot paintjob out there. it just seemed like there were people dismissing this technique wholesale because they couldn't get enough shine out of the paintjob in the end when in all likelihood it was their colorsanding and buffing technique that caused the problem. they would likely have just about as flat a paintjob from a professional gun with 2k paints as they would with rustoleum because they were not finishing the job correctly.

of course, this doesn't answer any of the questions of durability in regards to the elements, sun, gasoline, grit and other crap that cars get put through, but at least this is encouraging enough to let me know that the paint can look awesome given that the proper care is taken that you would use for ANY paint job.