Hi folks,

I've dabbled in painting over the years but never had good equipment. Now i have a gun and compressor etc...

For christmas i thought i'd resolve the hood on my sons pickup which has a clear coat thats breaking up. I thought i'd just sand off the bad clear without disturbing the base and shoot a clear over it all (after sanding of course).

When he arrived home (he lives about 7 hours away) and i started looking at the hood i saw dents, which i couldnt get to from behind and 50 or so stone chips... some that have gotten down to metal and are rusting. So i sanded anything rusty down to metal and applied filler. As i hadn't counted on using primer, i didnt buy any, but i had just a little 2k PU primer lying around to coat a couple times where i had used filler.

Then i went onto wet sanding the entire hood 600 grit. Everything seemed super smooth and with water flowing on top looked great.

Then i shot a base metalic silver, 3 coats. I cant remember if i was already seeing defects but went onto the clear coat...

With the clear i immediately saw problems and as i already had all the clear in the gun i shot the 3 coats.

The result is a nice glossy surface with little to no orange peel, BUT the base looks like crap! I'm seeing that basically every place that i sanded has shown up, so i guess that i didnt do enough sanding and i remember freaking out about sanding through any primer because i didnt have any more - so i went easy. i would have shot the whole hood in primer if i had had enough primer o hand. As it was christmas and things were closed i decided to make do...

So my plan is to block sand (wet) the clear with 600 grit and spray the base then clear again.

The idea of this all was to just improve the appearance... so i didnt bother trying to fill in ALL of the little dings and lows. But now, am i obliged to correct it all?? I mean, the block isnt going to sand a low, so can't i just sand the low by hand?

And the fact that i have a few lows and slight dings... does this mean that with a metalic base that its always going to stick out like a sore thumb?


Hope you all had a safe and merry Christmas.

Happy new years!

Cheers,

Mike

Whenever the clear coat fails you need to strip the base off as well. Clear coat provides UV protection for the base coat and when it fails the base begins deteriorating.

Prep work is the main part of a great paint job. With the right equipment (compressor, drier, filters, spray gun, etc.) painting is the easy part.

Your plan to sand the clear and respray the base should work. The only concern will be the amount of build you will have and those areas where you left the old base coat. Time will tell.