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Damn gnats and bugs. Guess im going to have to live with it. Its not like im painting for a show quality finish.



There might be two things you can try... go to your local hippee store ( or maybe even Walmart ) and buy a 'blacklight'... Put it out in the yard on a lamp that you don't care about. The little gnats, moths, flies, mosquitoes and just about every other flying pest will go 'to the light'. And the fun thing is that blacklights heat up like you wouldn't believe... so any bug that is stupid enough to land on the light will be roasted and toasted before it knows what hit it.

In the meantime they will have been drawn away from your fresh coat of paint...

Now... on the topic of bugs flying on to the fresh paint... I agree with you. It seems there is something in the smell that draws the buggers to it. BUT one thing I learned... is that IF bugs land on the paint DON'T TOUCH THEM.

The odds are that the weight of the bug is not sufficient to penetrate too deeply into the skin of the paint as it is curing. The bug is usually attached on the outermost part of the paint skin.

So you let the paint fully dry... and the bug will fully dry with it... and the odds are that when you take a tack cloth to it after, the dried bug will easily separate from the paint as you are lightly wiping. The only evidence left behind might be a part of their leg hehhehe. The next coat of paint will take care of that tiny glitch. And even if you are moving on to the compounding, polishing and waxing stage, that will also go a long way towards making the gravesite of the bug disappear or become quite a bit less obvious.

I don't know what I would have done if a full size moth had stuck himself into the fresh paint. Fortunately it never happened... although I did have a STUPID cat walk on the hood while it was still curing ( that required a resanding and fresh coat of paint ).

With regards to hair in the fresh paint... it depends if it is human or dog... When I was doing my initial painting I kept seeing human hair in the fresh paint. Sadly I must admit that it was coming off of me. After all, we humans shed hair all the time ( and especially in the shower and when brushing or combing our hair ). The solution to this problem was rather simple - I wore a baseball cap everytime I painted. No more hair from me.

The only time I would try to remove hair from fresh paint is if I spotted that evil hair WHILE I was painting. At least at that point, I could get the hair off the wet paint and re-roll quickly over that spot ( feathering around it to blend it in ).

IF the paint was dried and I noticed a hair... I did not bother trying to dig it out of the freshly cured paint. IF I could use the tweezers on an exposed end of the hair, then I would try that to see how cleanly I could get the hair out.
In some cases the layer of paint that it is embedded in is thinner than the thickness of the paint itself. So you could make a greater mess by trying to pluck the hair out. So I just let the next coat of paint cover over it - and it seemed to work out quite well.

One nice thing about the pictures you provided is that it is becoming visibly clear on how much better the car is going to look once it is fully clothed with fresh black paint. A 10 footer is always better then a 50 footer if you know what I mean.