WOAH I didn't think it was going to turn out as good as it did! Nice job!

Say Ivarb...

I e-mailed a company in the UK at one point to ask about the cost of shipping true "coach paint" to the US. It didn't work out, but they mentioned Combicolor as a (lesser) alternative.

I like Brightside myself.

I got lucky when I bought my Brightside there was a guy on Ebay selling a six pack of either fire red or flag blue for $46 I still have a couple of quarts left when the weather stablizes I'm going to redo my roof & finish the bed which I've never done.

lol, theres a little cake next to my name. FINNALY I'm old enough to get my drivers license!

happy birthday to me!

lol, I get that all the time

I have been following these threads since I found out about them on April 19th this year. Currently, I'm on page 72 with a long way to go, but I wanted to ask a question that may have already been brought up. If so, I'm sorry I haven't gotten there yet.

I have my car, a 1970 Falcon, completely disassembled as I was planning on taking it in for media blasting, and then to be painted. Of course, that process has put a hold on my project because of the costs involved. Then I ran across these threads, and have been hooked for the past week. I really think I want to try to do this as well.

My car is a rust free Colorado car with badly faded original paint. There are a few parking lot dings here and there, but no major repairs are needed.

My main question is, has anyone else gone down to just the body shell, and then did the complete process to the entire body? I'll be doing a color change from a burnt orange metallic, to solid white with the possibility of adding a couple of blue stripes down the center much like you would see on a Mustang.

Thanks to Charger, and the rest of the regulars that I have been following through the first 72 pages. I plan on reading all, but wanted to ask this question now.

Thanks,
Otto...

Here's a photo as it sits now.

I've given this a roller thing a shot and, although it scared the (enter your choice of words) out of me, I am starting to get the hang of it.

I'm working with a Dynasty/Imperial project (my cardomain page should be in my sig if I've figured out how to use this forum software correctly). Really long story short, its a mutt made from a combination of Dynasty, New Yorker, and Imperial parts. I would consider myself experienced when taking about fiberglass work and fiberglass fabrication, as you can see from the pics this is not a normal imperial front end (that's just what I used to start with).

I had originally intended to do this car in flat black, using rustoleum flat black rattle cans. But I had a lot of problems getting proper coverage with the spry cans of flat black, it was flashing dry so fast that it wasn't leveling and was just looking like crud. I then tried wet sanding it smooth... that made it worse (if I had known about the 1st of these roller threads I'd have known about the probs of wetsanding flat paints!).

So, in frustration I basically said the heck with this and painted the car using rattle cans of primer black. It was cheap, it didn't look completely terrible... and I could make it a nice dark flat black by taking a rag of oil to it. Problem was, its very porous so it isn't good for a daily driver, it couldn't be kept clean, and it isn't UV-friendly. Within 6 months my primer black turned into primer gray!

I thought about the blitz black since they carry that in spry cans but I have read that too is porous, and I need something that won't rust my car out.

Well, in hearing about this I decided to try it, but using satin black. I've read through the first 1.6 threads, that far into it I didn't see that anyone had tried this yet.

My results actually weren't bad. I am using ordorless mineral spirits and in mixes ranging from 1/1 to 1/4 (mineral spirits/paint), and haven't found anything particularly different between such extreme ranges of mineral spirits. However if I go thicker than 1/4 I do find myself having problems with the texture (bad orange peel texture), and if I go thinner than 50/50 I have problems in getting the paint under control (runs etc).

It took some experimenting for me to figure out how to do this, the first coat I tried (just on the front of the car) was so bad I really started to wonder if I had just made a mistake in attempting it, orange peel & runs like I'd never seen on a car before. My observation was, that the first 1-2 coats no matter how I did it, or what part of the car I did it to, would look absolutely disgusting. But every subsequent coat after that would make it look more and more presentable and by the 3rd & 4th coat I had a "10 foot" paint job.

Now, unlike the people I've been reading in these threads who are trying to go glossy or "wet", I don't want that at all. I want satin black, no clear coat, no "wet" look, and most importantly I want texture. So I am not wet sanding down to perfectly smooth, in fact the only prep work I have done between coats so far is in sanding out rogue runs, and using a tact cloth to remove any pollen/dirt. The question becomes "can i get the final coat good enough to where i can simply polish/wax it, and have it look the way I want?" The short answer is yes, I've been able to get my hood and roof to look the way I want the whole car to look (roof only has 2 coats, hood 4- no sanding outside of removing runs between coats!).

In these pics you'll see the car looks "better" the closer you get to the front of the car, and the worse the farther back you look- thats because I have been painting 1 section at a time, and the rear only has 1 coat, the front has 4- everything between that has something within that range.









Mind you the car is not finished, my quarter panels are removed, the rockers aren't painted, and the green hue is from all the pollen (its spring). But for no wet sanding, and just minor removal of occasional runs- I am liking what I see. I am not perfectly satisfied with the doors or rear pillars, too many runs I need to take out. But the texture of the rest is close to what I am looking for.

I went and compared it to my neighbor's car, which has a professional satin black $5k paintjob (no clear, and textured) and its comparable only mine has more "mistakes" (small runs here and there I need to fix, a couple areas have more of an orange peel texture). I think that someone -could- get a show car satin black paintjob this way, the question would be how many coats it would take them to put down a final coat without any errors (as there would be NO room for error with a paint you can't wet sand).

If this weren't a daily driver, I would have probably disassembled more, I probably would have fixed the front pass door (has a dent) but, I am really just waiting until I find a rust free dent-less door so I can replace it instead of trying to bondo something that can be cheaply found at a upullit.

I was surprised how much paint this would take, I assumed since I was thinning 25-50%, I would get more out of it. But I am getting about 1 coat of the whole car out of 1 quart can of satin black. Its also next to impossible to find, only one rustoleom dealer around me had it!

You can see how much better it looks than faded primer black (picture is from 1st test application, rums & peel everywhere b/c I didn't know what I was doing yet):


I think it would be a decent paintjob by the time I'm around 6-8 coats, as there are still some low spots (i.e. the picture of the roof).

I am not convinced I'd do this to a high dollar show car, but for my application its great. I gotta wonder if anyone would want to try the roller method only without as much work (less worrying about runs or orange peel) to give it that "old school rat rod" feel to it. After all, its not like rat rod builders originally had all the high tech spry tools & paints that people are using today to build rat rods ....

A couple questions--first, how long does each coat take? I know it's somewhat dependent on the particular vehicle. I'm looking at either late nights or early mornings so I want to know how much earlier I'm going to have to wake up for this. Can't wait to start, although I may do my upholstery first.

Also, I looked around a bit, but didn't find much on upholstery. I'd love to see a forum that was so friendly to the quality and budget-minded DIY-er, but with an upholstery bent as I need to do that, too. Anyone see info on upholstery around?

OK--one more question. Any of these paint jobs in San Diego? I'd love to see one.

this is a crappy edit but somthing like this?

Today I was bored and decided to paint a hood I have laying around the farm.
I just scuffed it with 220, I then took Tremclad Recreational white, and added a few table spoons of Tremclad gloss black into the 6 0unces of paint (now very light gray hue to it), I then added about 3/4 of an ounce of Evercoats DOI wetlook hardener, and 2 1/2 ounces of generic medium speed enamel reducer(xylene content).
I used my not-so expensive, HVLP 1.4 tip gravity feed spraygun, and layed on a mist coat, on the one side of the hood, let this flash about 20 minutes and then shot on a nice medium coverage film.
It looks great, no runs, no peel, and it is still flashing, might add a 3rd coat.
I realize this is a roller thread, but there might be people reading this who would like to spray enamel paint.
Once you add hardener to synthetic resin enamel(tremclad,rustloeum,XO rust), it becomes a modified alkyd enamel, takes on many traits of an acrylic enamel, harder, shinier, more fad resistance,dires faster).
this mix sprays real nicer, and you don't need high end sprayguns to do it, just a halfway decent home compressor, spraygun, line filrers to keep out moisture and some practice................

Hello, new member here.
I've been reading a lot of pages and you guys have inspired me to get a roller and go for it.
I've used a primer first and now I'm doing my third layer. I use very thin paint, a little thicker than water, but I'm expericing a lot of airbubbles in my paint. What did I do wrong? First I thought, they'll disappear when it starts to dry. But this was not the case. The conditions are ok, a little sunshine, not too warm (20 degree Celcius) and like I said, very thin paint. Is the paint too thin? Or did I paint too fast?
I hope you guys can help me, because it's a lot work to sand of the airbubbles, and very frustrating.
Thanks in advance.

I belive you needed to waite longer imbetween coats. The minneral sprits didn't have enough time to evaporate first. How quickly have you been putting coats of paint on after the previous coat?

I used two rollers what with paint and one dry, I use the dry roller to knock down the air bubbles. you'll find out the more you do this the less air bubbles will be a problem.