Sorry Denny, I failed to take another goofy selfie today with my entire face covered in orange paint. What was funny though was at around 2:45pm I had the paint gun in my hand, I'm wearing safety goggles and a respirator and obviously "in the middle of something" but true to form, my wife pokes her head in the garage and reminds me that this morning I agreed to go get one of my kids from school and take him to an activity at 3:00. Doh! I washed up real quick but it barely made a dent. The people at the school and where I dropped him off must have thought I was insane. Or maybe that I was a victim of a spray-tan experiment that went horribly wrong. I got paint on the steering wheel in my truck too. And unlike regular grimy dirt, paint does not seem to want to come off your skin with mere kerosene. But I digress.
Regardless of the aforementioned drama, I managed to finally lay down the first coat of color in the engine bay. Yes, it's splotchy. It will get at least one more coat and maybe two but I ran out of both paint hardener and reducer. When I painted the trunk, the first coat was similarly uneven and only after subsequent coats did it look right.
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Trying to decide whether to color sand in between coats. I think it needs it, the orange peel is pretty obvious and there are a couple runs that are going to bother me if I don't take care of them now. I'll start with 1,500 grit wet and go to 2,000 if I have the energy.
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This shot almost makes the paint look halfway decent. It's not! At least not yet.
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The factory paint in the areas above and below the firewall seam was really thin, almost non-existent. I went further back with the color just 'cause I wanted it that way. Hard to see in this pic but in the rear I tried to mimic the factory over spray patterns. It's OK but it looks weird to me because the paint is new.
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I debated spraying color on the entire underside but I'm going to leave the DP50 primer. There's two coats, it should last forever especially since it won't be exposed to UV rays from the sun and likely won't ever get real wet or dirty.
Mercifully though, I am nearing the end of my paint project here. I'll be honest, paint kinda sucks - it's labor intensive and messy and, if you screw something up you gotta do it over again. I'm really looking forward to moving on to the next thing.
More to come.
