Do It Yourself Hot Rod Kustom Website

	Primer and Painting So far I've stripped the paint and rough finished the roof chop. The car is in a rough primary and will need to be sanded and smoothed before any paint is applied. There is also the rusted rocker panels, rear quarter panels and trunk lip to be addressed not to mention the custom mods to be done. Here's the front in primer, the hood needs to have the channel filled yet. Here's the rear end, you can see the rusted out sections quite well now. Driver's door interior panel primed Passenger's side door primed Painting info The first part of the car that I painted was the dash. I needed to run the electrical wires and I had a choice to either wire up the car and then take everything apart again to paint or paint it first. I will mask off the painted dash to protect it during the rest of the cars build. The dash was stripped to bare metal inside and out. The interior was hand painted using a combination of a 3" roller and a small paint brush. It wasn't as bad as I thought as everything was removed. The dash stripped to bare metal Just painted and still masked - looking very good! Ready for putting back together While in the process of painting the car, I met a good friend, Ron, who was a professional bodyman/painter. He informed me that the Western Paint that I was using was old technology and that a newer technology called base coat/clear coat has several advantages that make the Western 3 part epoxy paint obsolete. It became quite obvious as I painted the car and made the standard number of mistakes where using a base coat/clear coat would of been a great time saver. The base coat/clear coat system applies a color coat on first. This is the base coat and it dries to a dull primer like finish in about an hour or less. The quick drying time is the advantage because if you make any mistakes you can quickly correct them and reshoot. The Western style paint takes 24 hours to dry. If you make a mistake with the Western style paint, you have to wait a day, repair and reshoot. It takes days to fix while base coat/clear coat takes hours. After the base coat is on and your happy, you shoot a clear coat which brings out the shine. You can shoot a car in a day. I've left the old paint info below. Old Painting info I found a beautiful metallic blue (W525) from Western Automotive Paints (a division of Sherwin Williams Paints) at the local parts store. I used the Hi Glo catalyzed synthetic enamel that was very forgiving and gives quite a high shine. I used a low temperature reducer that works between 45 and 75 degF which is the normal temperature of my garage (I live in Canada!). You mix it in an 8 parts paint (W525) to 2 parts reducer (WS4575) to 1 part hardener (W1016) combination. Then paint a tack coat - just enough paint to lightly cover. Let it flash for 10 minutes to allow the chemicals to evaporate and get tacky. Then paint a wet coat, flash for another 10 minutes and then the final wet coat. I was very impressed that I didn't have any runs as the surface is very irregular and I had the spray gun in all angles. Like I said the paint is very forgiving! Be a newbie to non-spray bomb paint, I was a little confused about the whole paint mixing process. Here's the scoop on Western's synthetic enamel which has very good reference information on their website. You do have to read it over quite a few times. Anyways, there are 3 methods of mixing the paint: Uncatalyzed This is called the economy coat. You only add reducer to the paint. This is the quick way to paint a car for the least amount of money. Medium shine. Catalyzed This gives a deep finish and harder surface than uncatalyzed. You add reducer and hardener to the paint. I went this way because there is the option of spraying a clearcoat on top if it is not shiny enough. The clearcoat uses the same reducer and hardener (cost savings). I'm very happy with the current finish of the catalyzed synthetic enamel. Integrated reducers This gives the deepest finish and best performance of the three mixes. It is a urethane mix and uses special hardeners and reducers specific to urethanes. They mention that this is the choice for high metallic content paints. I take it to refer to large metallic flakes as the catalyzed mix worked fine with the W525 small flakes. The toughest part about painting is patience while spraying. You have to force yourself to not give too heavy a coat. If you see a small area that is not quite covered and its the first or second coat. Leave it for the next coat to cover it. It's too easy to put on too much paint and have it run. Touch-up gun I used a new touch-up gun that I purchased from Princess Auto. Normally it was $45 but on sale for $15. It works like a dream except that I didn't check to see if all the fittings were tight. On the last coat, it spit a small drop of paint on the inside of the glove box cause one of the fittings loosened up. I'm not too worried as it'll be hidden by the glove box door. I'll leave the paint spit as a reminder of my first real paint job. The touch up gun holds 1 pint of paint and it took about 1 pint to paint 3 coats on the dash. I filled the gun for each coat as I didn't want to tilt the gun and suck air in by accident. There's three adjustments that you can adjust on the touch-up gun: fan, paint and air pressure. The fan control sets how wide a spray fan pattern, I set it for about 4-5" wide as I was painting tight small areas of the dash. The paint control sets how much paint you spray. I set it by test spraying a piece of cardboard so that the paint didn't run after spraying for 2 seconds. The last control is the air pressure which I set at the compressor. The paint instructions said to set it for 45 psi but I set it lower since I will be painting about 6-8 inches from the surface. The most important step is to test your settings by spraying on a piece of cardboard or flat surface. You should be able to spray for 2 seconds without running. High pressure non spill paint gun I purchased 3 spray guns through garage sales and estate sales for a total of $20. They are all pre HVLP (high volume low pressure) guns. One that I paid $5 for is excellent for spraying primer. You don't need lots of control for spraying primer. The one shown above is a "Binks" style spray gun that is a non spill design. On the top of the 1 quart reservoir is a bleed hole that has a yellow plastic tube connected to it in a U shape. If you tip the gun, the paint won't drip out the reservoir bleed hole. I've previously painted 4 cars in my lifetime, all with spraybombs (lots of them). I was very impressed with the control and the consistency I had during painting when using proper equipment and paint. I was worried about mixing the paint, spraying the paint and even cleaning up the spray guns. It was a lot easier than I thought and a lot easier than spray bombs.