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god damn...i woke up early morning to start this project around 7am. suns up and cloudy, nothing to serious. 3 hours later i hear thunder in the distance. i turn on the tv to check the weather and sure enough its heading this way.

will the rain ruin the paint?



No... If you are just at the starting layers of painting... the rain will not harm the paint IF you take appropriate procedures before adding the next layer of paint.

For example, rain is full of all sorts of odd chemicals ( if only it was just h20 ). There are acids, sulphurs and other other crapola in rain water.

So before you add your next coat of paint, just give the previous coat a light sanding, a wash with very little liquid dish detergent in in it. Thoroughly rinse off and when the car is dried, give it a final wipe down with a cloth damped LIGHTLY with mineral spirit. That will ensure that all potential contaminants are gone.

If the rain has put a lot of humidity into the air, be sure to allow extra drying time for the paint. Humidity in the air tends to slow down the drying/curing time.

Depending on the air temperature, the moisture in the air tends to be attracted to the body of the car. If you can imagine the condensation that occurs on a hot water pipe that is exposed to cold air, the same type of moisture attaction is occurring at a less visible ( almost microscopic level ) on the car body. The wipe down of the car with the cloth slightly damped with mineral spirit helps to displace some of that near invisible moisture.

I know for myself, that during my paint job we were going through quite a few rainy days. In order to avoid any problems caused by the humidity in the air I chose to just keep holding off on further painting until the weather changed and the humidity was gone. I may have just been overly cautious, but I just wanted to make absolutely sure that if something went wrong with the paint job, it was because I had rushed things.

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