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So I have to wait a week for the paint to dry? What's the shortest time I'd have to wait in cold weather?



Well... one thing about paint... is that it has a different ( lower ) freezing point then mineral spirits. So the problem you face when trying to speed up the process in the winter is that although the mineral spirit may have evaporated... the paint itself may not have fully cured ( hardened ). If you lay down another coat of paint too soon ( over an un-hardened coat of paint ), the result will be the dreaded orange peel. That is why I was trying to take advantage of your situation, with a car stuck in the garage for the winter, to schedule the re-coats from weekend to weekend. That would practically guarantee that the mineral spirits will have evaporated and the paint itself will have cured sufficiently to allow painting over without fear of orange peel.

It may be possible to cut times down to every three days for a re-coat... but temperatures will be fluctuating from day to day.

Up here in Ottawa, we went from -24 degrees celcius ( bloody lip numbing cold ) up to almost a luxurious +10 degrees celcius all in the span of one week. And we are just getting in to our winter season. That kind of temperature variance would play havoc trying to guesstimate how many days you could wait between recoats. And to top it off... we have also been getting RAIN storms instead of snow storms. So that buggers up the humidity factoring for trying to guess how many days to wait between coats.

So overall... although it may pain you or push your patience... it is always better to err on the outside and give it more time between re-coats, then less.

I know for my final two coats... I actually and intentionally waited about 3 weeks between those final coats. I wanted to wait until the optimal weather conditions were present ( no rain or humidity )... and so I just kept holding off and waiting. And believe me... it killed me not being able to get the project finished. BUT I was more interested in nailing it right for those last two coats and I didn't want any of the 'enviromental' variable to be a factor in how it turned out. Mostly I was dealing with a consistently wet summer... but the same reasoning would have been applied in the colder part of the season.

One other nice thing about doing your paint job over the winter... and spacing out the re-coats by the weekends.. is that there is nothing to stop you going out to the garage on the Thursday to spend a couple of hours doing a very careful wet sanding ( in order to prepare the surface for the next re-coat on the weekend ). Since you are not being rushed, you have the luxury of doing the surface prep to perfection prior to the next re-coat. And that also helps allow for a better finished product at the end.

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