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New to the board, but I've been reading quite a bit about rolling on paint on a car. It's great to see a way to get a paint job without having to get a second mortgage out on a house.
Anyway, I have to ask what's likely a stupid question. Never painted a car before and the car I'd like to paint has faded and had the clear coat coming off with the paint underneath going too, showing bare metal in spots. I drive it to work every day and was hoping I could get some advice on whether I should do take up this project on my days off and it'd be fine to drive to work and back without messing the whole thing up, or would it only be possible to make this project work if I found alternate transportation and parked this car while I painted?

Either way, it's going to get done. If all goes well, I've got a '56 Studebaker Transtar pickup I'd love to finish the bodywork on and paint up.



The biggest advantage of doing the car without making use of it between painting stages, is that you would lessen a lot of the additional cleaning up and 'remedying' prior to the addition of the next coat of paint.

For example, lets say you put a coat of paint on the car on Friday night. Let it dry and do a second coat on Saturday morning. Let it dry and maybe do a third light coat of paint on Sunday.

At this point you would not want to do a wetsanding - BECAUSE - you plan now to drive it as it is for the next Monday to Friday.

When the next Friday evening comes along, you would at that time do your wetsanding that you skipped the week earlier. The reason for this is that by driving the car through the week you have added dead bugs and just about everything else that can flip up on to your car during your weekday driving. So this wetsanding would do two jobs.. it would be your time to smooth out the surface of any roughness - while at the same time removing the surface layer of the previous coat of paint that all the road crap 'contaminated'.

So on that second Friday you would do the wet sanding, lay on the next coat of paint, let it dry til the next day and then add the next coat of paint.

Now... if it happens that some areas of the car are masked off with newspaper or tape - you may find that you will be adding and removing that tape at the beginning and finishing of each painting sesssion. I don't think any of us would want to bear the embarrasment of driving down the road with painters masking tape all over our cars. But then again, it would be such a ghetto look that it might start a new car fashion trend ( sort of like those guys who wear baseball hats with the price tags still attached - or who wear pants so low down to their knees that although questionably fashionable, it presents a real problem when they are trying to run from the police hahahhah ).

So I guess it is "do-able'... you just have to plan ahead a bit for the debris, rain, squirrels, tree and bird droppings, flying insects and other nasty things that will land on your coats of paint.

The advantage of the car sitting in one place is that you are not under the gun to complete the task and you are not exposing the freshly dried paint to potential contaminants. In the end, this means less actual work for you - in that you are not having to take three steps forward and one step backward each week due to circumstances beyond your control.

Overall, if the car sits in one place... you would have the ability to make use of a few hours each weekday when you come home from work, to add a coat of paint.. or to wetsand.... etc. Overall, this could reduce the amount of actual 'downtime' of not having your car to drive. You might be able to get the real grunt work down over a two week period instead of spreading it out over a four or six weeks of part time painting..

But as we have seen earlier in this thread... there have been some 'daily drivers' that have been used all while coats of paint were being applied. I recall a white Camaro that added his paint and did his work each day when he drove to College. Prior and after going to class he did his work in the College parking lot.

So it is 'do-able' - it just takes a different type of planning - to plan the logical steps of doing the painting to fit your 'daily drivers' actual time that it is required to be on the road and being driven.

Last edited by Marq; 04/26/08 02:33 PM.