So, I've never done any sort of body work or painting. I'm excellent with a wrench, and finally decided to mess around with some paint work. The car is far from exciting but I already owned it and figured it would be a good project to learn on since there is no rust to deal with and only a couple door dings.



The teardown started because after 285k miles the engine was leaking a good bit of oil. Decided to fix that. Saw the transmission hanging there and thought I should try out my new transmission jack. Kept going until I had everything including the glass out lol.


I ordered up some ********** products. White epoxy primer, ********** red, and universal clear. Wanted to minimize variables leading to a poor job so bought an iwata az3 hte gun for primer and a tekna prolite for base/clear being fed by a 60 gal compressor and 1/2" hose with high flow 1/4" fitting.

So far I have the doors, fenders, and engine bay epoxied. Should have the rest of the shell completed tomorrow. It's been about 90° in my garage, and I'm pretty pleased with how it has been laying out so far considering I've never held a spray gun before. Looking forward to getting the blocking done and trying some color.

You're crazy lol but looks great !!!!!

Yep a little crazy but like I rationalized, it's experience for a more worthy project in the future and I'm only out the cost of time and materials. Plus I'm having fun

Managed to make it back out and finished spraying the shell between working 12hr night shifts. Luckily I get a week off starting tomorrow so should hopefully get to laying color down next week.






I had a bit of dust get in it but wasn't too worried seeing as how I will be sanding it all down anyway. Figure I'll do a good cleanup and re-hang some fresh plastic before shooting the color. Probably add some lighting as well.

mate, your doing bloody bonza on your 1st attempt, even your masking skills look amazing!!
im looking at making a diy booth like yours for my future projects, hows it setup??
keep up the great work mate
krem

That is a big project for your first try. Lookin' good tho.

I just got my home brew booth together last weekend. Nothing fancy, just somewhere I can paint without crap falling out of the trees into my fresh clear.

The setup I'm using is just enough to get by, could definately use some improvement. It's sufficient for this stage but I've heard that clear gets really foggy in comparison so it'll be interesting to see how well it performs when I get to that stage.

This is inside my attached three car garage. I took up two of the "bays."

I used 1/2" pvc pipe with the cube measuring 18'x16'x7.5'. I didn't glue anything so I could tear it down and re use materials.

I couldn't find big rolls of the plastic I wanted, they were all too thin so I taped together multiple sheets of 2 mil plastic and covered PVC shell with it and stapled the middle to the rafters so it formed a tent. Wrapped the bottom around the PVC.

I have five fans pushing air into the tent through filters creating positive pressure and exiting through a series of filters, with an exhaust tunnel going out the back door of the garage.

I have about six t12 lights that I hung from the PVC which, combined with the fans, just about maxes out my garage power outlets.

I get a lot of free time at work so I watched countless videos and read through forums while getting paid getting ready for this lol. I'm open to any advice

i really like the diy booth, i think i will have to borrow that idea!

Got to have a place to paint....

Well, I finally made some progress. I have learned a bit and am already wanting to try the next project just to see how much more efficient I can be.

I did some minor filler work on door dings etc. and re-sprayed with epoxy for coverage, then did a seal coat. Well, the seal coat came out like crap on the roof. I think I should have just sprayed over the blocked out epoxy and not bothered with a seal coat.

I've grown tired of this being in my garage so made the best of it, did a little sanding on the areas that weren't quite right on the roof and pulled the trigger with some color. There's a few 180 scratches that show up on the roof where I didn't sand enough with 400. Shouldn't be too big of a deal after putting the roof rack stuff back on. Looking to spray my clear tomorrow. Here's some shots of the base.


Overall I'm pretty pleased with how this is turning out, not having any experience or a hands on mentor. I wish the warm weather wasn't on the way out. Spraying epoxy at 95F is a lot different than at 70F

Got the clear done. Did a great job of filling in those worry spots I had. Just have a couple runs to wet sand out. I think the temperature was slightly too cold for the activator I was using, my panel temp was 65F. I've gained a whole lot of confidence in this side of the auto hobby