Little House on The Prarie

[Joloke]

Pebbledash

 

[lesapandre]

Botch 1. I had to renew the rear tailgate yesterday on my Citroen AX. Second hand part cus someone broke the back window and the two are bonded so was cheaper to buy the lot. £45 from a very nice man in Glastonbury. Not a hippie. But its the wrong colour - car is red and tailgate a later Citroen metallic green. What to do - I'm going to paint the lower part of the tailgate matt black - its all plastic - the upper frame is matt black already. Thought it might look ok - will report back. Two tins of matt black purchased at Poundland...tomorrow awaits.

 

Collection was an excuse to get out my '89 260E Mercedes - 300 mile round trip including M25 and M3 and a blast down the A303 no sweat for a 29 year old W124. Epic. Only older cars I spotted were a couple of early Discoveries and another 90's Merc. Rest were all moderns. 

[xtriple]

I used to love doing bodywork and best of all, so did my wife! We used to get quite competitive as to who could get the best result then check each others work, criticise and then rectify, it was... fun!  

 

It's all in the prep, paint covers nothing, just makes it look pretty.

[Fumbler]

Heatgun to bumper. The result was... interesting.

[drivewaymyway]

I have never been able to get a reliable shiny finish from rattle can, I've done loads, some has been fantastic and hardly noticeable others just looks like a 5 year old painting.. I am annoyed at the moment by the finish on my Berlingo, all I did was to fill a couple of small dings and heavy scratches and have tried to paint and lacquer but when I polish and buff the finish is  just a white dull finish when the paint is silver.. I have rubbed it back and resprayed it that many times what was just a ding has become almost the whole side of the car..

[vulgalour]

Rattle cans are a fine art.  By intuition and trial-and-error you learn the distance, speed of pass, overlap, etc. required for each particular brand.  The most common errors with rattle cans are folks spraying too far away and too fast (leads to orange peel and fogginess) or too slow and close (sags and runs).  Silver is one of the hardest colours of all to get right out of the can.  Silver is reliant on the base colour, the number of coats, and the depth of lacquer, get any of these wrong and you'll end up with a crap job.  Also, silver seems more prone to humidity interfering with the finish than other colours (at least in my limited experience).  I just avoid silver, it's even worse than gold to get right.

 

There's so many things that can and do go wrong with rattle can paintjobs it's a wonder any of them turn out well, really.

[Bren]

I did the front wings on the passat with cans. It is a good match and you will be hard pushed to tell the paint was from a can.

The secret is good cans ( not from the high street), warm temperature and hold the can fairly close otherwise you will simply not get the depth of coverage. I will post some pics tomorrow.

[forddeliveryboy]

I once saw a car with a driveway paint job (open air), unbelievably good to the extent I'd have said it was a pro in a booth - but it was in celly.

[DSdriver]

Does anyone use a spatter coat when prepping?

[xtriple]

Rattle cans are okay but the prep must be perfect as the paint in the cans is like piss and the coverage is so thin there is no room for errors. Warming the cans helps with the flow (stand in warm/hot water) and take it slow. The decent paint in cans is easy to use and so much better than the stuff you can get pre-mixed from Halfords etc. But, more expensive.

 

Always remember, with metallics, you must spray the paint with the panel in the orientation that will be on the car: i.e. if you spray a wing off the car but do it stood on end, the 'flake will be at the wrong angles and won't match the rest of the car regardless of how good a match the paint is or how good a job you do.

 

Metallics used to be temperature sensitive (not sure about modern spray cans) so if it was cold the paint would be darker, higher temps got a lighter result.

 

I used to love spraying cellulose, so easy to use and can be snded and polished to a lovely finish, but then two packs came out and once you get used to them, so much easier to do.  When all you could get was water based two stage shit, I dreaded it, but I have done a few bits in this now and it is so easy it's unreal. Just very strange painting a green panel and the paint (initially) goes on blue then dries totally differently, then changes again when laquered. You really do not know what you are going to end up with until that final stage!

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

I have a silver car. I hate reapering silver. I hate it so much I'm looking into a colour change.

[DaveDorson]

I can probably chip in here, as I'm doing a full on restoration at the moment.

 

But, I'm also crap at taking pictures when I'm in a zone and getting stuff done.

[PiperCub]

Warming the rattle cans is a trick I picked up years ago too. Makes alot of difference and as someone already said, the actual paint is very thin and covers poorly so you need to be relatively close and moving the can at a steady constant rate. Do it in several thin coats, less chance of runs etc. 

 

Like many things, a good finish is down to practice and the patience to prepare the surface as best as you possibly can.

[Supernaut]

From the thread linked to in my signature, about my 320i.

 

I repaired a weird rusty blister thing just behind the driver's door on it a couple of months back.

 

I started by sanding it, and applying some Kurust.

 

 

 

 

I then applied some filler.

 

 

 

 

I sanded the filler, then applied some knifing putty.

 

 

 

Lots of applying knifing putty, waiting for it to harden, then sanding it smooth. You want to be so smooth you can run your finger over it without feeling any imperfections at all.

 

 

 

 

Eventually, I got it to a pretty smooth state then decided to paint. Luckily the area where the blistering happened was nicely sectioned off by the door, the trim piece above, and the wheel arch, so I was able to paint the whole area without needing to blend / colour match.

 

 

 

 

 

The usual procedure applied. A couple of coats of primer, sand them with a nice high grade of sandpaper, then apply colour, sanding with a high grade of sandpaper between each coat. Then once the last coat of colour is on, don't sand that one (obviously) then a few coats of lacquer.

 

The finished article.

 

 

 

During painting, I used some generic Halfords dark green as a base coat between primer and Boston Green, going by some advice from here. It didn't work too well and the Halfords green still showed through. I ended up sanding it back a bit and applying even more coats of Boston Green about a week later, which sorted it out properly.

 

I will admit, it's not a perfect finish. If you look really closely at that bit of the car now, you can tell it doesn't quite have the same quality of reflections on it as the rest of the car. It's a very good colour match though, and being that it's so low down and I hardly wash the car, you can't tell.

[D Spares & Tyres]

I have some tips:

 

Always use hardener in your filler (Why didn't anybody tell the 16 year old me?)

 

Throw away ancient Bar coat (it reacts worse than any paint reaction you will see)

 

Make sure the glazing wipes are kept far,far away from the adhesion wipes

 

Tape up the edge of the spray gun lid to stop any dripping.

 

Do not leave masking tape on any longer than necessary

 

Silver is a twat. Never even attempt to blend it in. Just avoid.

 

Paint BEFORE Waxoyling

 

If you get a big run on a panel,keep chucking the paint on til it drip off the bottom. Then when it dries, just cut it off.

 

When you have painted a panel, leave immediately and don't return for several hours. You will fuck it up somehow otherwise.

 

 

 

After fucking up a spray job for whatever reason, just count to ten then leave. Never throw spray guns. It just makes matters far, far worse.

 

I probably have many more useful tips but that will do for now. All advise is from personal experience...

[Shirley Knott]

I've had varying results from rattle cans ranging from spectacular to downright abysmal. Little things like warming the cans/picking the right weather etc help.

 

Most recently I sorted a bit of rust on the wife's Lupo where it'd had a knock in the past, work comprised of rub back to good metal/Hydrate80/Etch prime/Paint (Halfords colour matched rattle can)

 

 

 

 

Behold the finished article!

 

 

 

Far from perfect and the slight dent remains unaddressed. FWIW Jobs lower down on the body seem easier to make a good job of IME, all in all a 5/10 I recon, stops the rust getting any worse and you don't really notice it from a few steps back.

 

 All that being said any car worth more than about £600 goes straight to my local paint guy who's fairly cheap anyway at circa £100 a panel usually.

[oldcars]

Helped with all the prep on the 75 when we did a fill repaint. Hand sanded all the key marks out. Make sure that the area sanded has no dips in it. Masking is a pain, took me ages. Mate has aerosol panel wipe which was great. He did all the primer, i wet flatted it back. He then put a guide? coat i think he said. That was sanded back and we could then see if there were any small dings missed and sorted these. He painted it all and then i colour sanded it and machine polished it up. Loved that bit.

[Burnside]

Question, my brother has a brand new front subframe that needs painting. It's a aftermarket old stock item finished in a matt black protective paint coating. Some of it has flaked off inside a difficult to reach section as its boxed in. So sanding / painting going to be fun.

 

Are we best off paying someone to shotblast / powdercoat it which will be costly or can I save us some cash, by scuffing the surface with sandpaper and hand painting the hard to reach sections. Then spray the rest with primer rattle cans then use stonechip cans for a topcoat?