Repainting an ENTIRE car

A

Animosity

New member
Anyone have any tips to repainting a car? Im planning on stripping it all down myself and redoing it all. The doorjams, and the rest of the car, everything except the engine bay will be repainted. What do I need to do a decent job?
 
A LOT!



Unless you have a lot of time and a lot of patience, I would get it done by someone else. I would recommend bead blasting in preference to sand blasting, the sand can be a little too abrasive. And if you are doing the rest of the car, why skip over the engine bay? I'd do it as well if you were doing the job properly. No point skimping......
 
Unless you have some time and patience on your hands, I would rather get it done by a professional. If anything, talk to DLW on here. He repainted his son's black prelude(basically redid the car for him), and it came out fantastic.
 
I debated painting one of my vehicles, however once i started looking into the materials needed, it ended up being a lot cheaper to just get it painted by someone.
 
yea, i agree. im not saying that you lack experience or anything, but in the end, i think it would just be a lot less of a hassle is you got it painted by a professional. thats what my dad did with his el camino
 
I recently had my car resprayed. I did think long and hard about doing a lot of the work myself and had several chats with the bodyshop. Given my constraints of time and resources the compromise we came to was I would remove most of the external trim so that the shop could get on with the paint removal process quickly.



This had several effects. Firstly, it reduced the labour charges and secondly, it allowed me to fully clean all the external trim at my own pace.



If I were you I would go and have a chat with your bodyshop and see what they recommend. Remember, most bodyshops hate removing trim.
 
Getting it done by a body shop could save you a lot of time but it also will cost a lot. Don't be cheap and go to a lowball shop because you will get poor quality paint, overspray galore, etc. Depending on the shop you might be able to save money if you remove most of the trim. I've talked to body shop guys and a lot hate when the customer says he will do the prepwork (ie sanding) because most times they don't do it properly. If you do it by yourself however, you have an excuse to buying your own equipment, you learn alot about body work, and you can have a ton of fun doing it! I'm in the process of saving for a proper compressor so I'm a bit biased in my preference though. I would say this also depends on the vehicle though. I'm going to be painting my project car first before I start playing with my more expensive toy. So I think doing it yourself can be a great experience but I wouldn't recommend it if you're doing it to save the money.
 
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