Rust Repair Maiden Voyage
On Saturday it was warm and calm enough to paint outdoors. I learned a few lessons, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out. I used a Preval bottle and a half pint of custom-mixed paint from Finishmaster. The paint guy started with the F5 formula but he said he added a lot of flattener to make it match the 43-year-old paint on the car. I sprayed a metal can first to see if the color matched, and it was pretty good. Here's the mixed bottle:
And here's the tape job. You can see I left a little red showing, about 1/4 to 1/2 inch. That enabled me to be sure I was covering all the primer with enough coats of red. Rear of the wheel well, I lined up the tape with the kink in the panel, which did a nice job hiding the slightly different color of the new paint. Forward of the wheel well I didn't have that luxury. It's not shown, but I also taped off the brake drum. You can see the half-assed nature of my work by the fact that I didn't bother to remove the rocker molding, but just wedged a stir stick behind it so I could sort of spray behind it.
And here's the final paint. I lost track of how many coats it was, probably 10 or more. I used about 8 oz of mixed paint in a 4:1:2 color:hardener:reducer mix.
You can see a diagonal line in front of the wheel well where the new paint is a little brighter than the old, but it looks way better than it did. Lessons learned:
On Saturday it was warm and calm enough to paint outdoors. I learned a few lessons, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out. I used a Preval bottle and a half pint of custom-mixed paint from Finishmaster. The paint guy started with the F5 formula but he said he added a lot of flattener to make it match the 43-year-old paint on the car. I sprayed a metal can first to see if the color matched, and it was pretty good. Here's the mixed bottle:
And here's the tape job. You can see I left a little red showing, about 1/4 to 1/2 inch. That enabled me to be sure I was covering all the primer with enough coats of red. Rear of the wheel well, I lined up the tape with the kink in the panel, which did a nice job hiding the slightly different color of the new paint. Forward of the wheel well I didn't have that luxury. It's not shown, but I also taped off the brake drum. You can see the half-assed nature of my work by the fact that I didn't bother to remove the rocker molding, but just wedged a stir stick behind it so I could sort of spray behind it.
And here's the final paint. I lost track of how many coats it was, probably 10 or more. I used about 8 oz of mixed paint in a 4:1:2 color:hardener:reducer mix.
You can see a diagonal line in front of the wheel well where the new paint is a little brighter than the old, but it looks way better than it did. Lessons learned:
- Spray away from a tape line, not toward it, to keep the edge "soft." I have a pretty significant ridge where the tape was.
- Take the time to get your primer coat really smooth before you paint. I deliberately chose to paint over a less-than-perfect primer coat because I wasn't going for a show-quality finish. But I ended up with a run where I was trying to get paint to fill in a tiny pit in the primer coat. The paint just kept building up around the pit until I got impatient and overdid that area. No regrets, but another coat of primer would have improved the outcome without a lot more work.
- Stay away from plants? Little bugs kept landing in my wet paint and I had to pick them out with tweezers. After the last coat I should have just let the bug dry in the paint. Pulling it out did more damage than leaving it in would have.
- Don't shake the Preval bottle after the propellant can is on. It says DO NOT SHAKE right on the box, in big bold letters. Somehow I missed that, and paint spilled out all over the can and the bottle.
