laquer is waaaay outdated but i do agree with him. painting is very rewarding and its always better to say "I did EVERYTHING myself". Prepare to do a lot of practicing. Painting is not hard once you have learned how to do it properly. It's actually very easy to do but like I said its a skill that needs to be perfected. Start off painting mailboxes or something that you can just paint and repaint.

 

How long does it take to get to where you can paint a car decently with the right tools?

 

make sure when you do paint it (or have it painted) that you sand the part down completely, otherwise a while down the road, the new layer will start to chip off. the previous owner of my car wrecked it (he didnt tell me about it but thats a different story) so he had it repainted on top of the original paint. he used primer and everything and it looked great... untill the bumper started to crack[:@]

 

It depends on a few things.... Say your just painting a bumper or fender because you replaced them this is proabably little less work but requires some skill. If your doing a complete BS/CC paintjob, there is a lot more work involved but no maybe just a lil less skill because your not matching anything so as long as you mixed your paint all at the same time(enough for the job) just as long as you get even coverage with your basecoat is all that is needed. The more inexperienced person may do 5 to 6 coats of base just to get it even where as I only need to do 2 maybe 3 depending on the color. Now on the other hand when you through tricoats(candys colors) in the picture its a completely different ball game. You Have to get even coverage with candys. You have to have almost perfect overlap and steady hands because with candys the thicker the paint the darker it appears. So if you slow down in one spot your gonna have a dark spot there or if you have a 75% overlap in one spot and 50% everywhere else you will ahve a line and the only way to fix that is to start all over.

But honestly BS/CC for the most part is Fairly easy. The clear is what challenges everybody. You have to bring it to that happy median looks wet but if you push it to much its gonna run like hell. Clear coats are gonna be the spendy mistakes. They can be finicky.

For a rough idea i would say with just a basic BC/CC paint job learning how to spray base coat would take about a half dozen times i would guess. Clear coat I would say 3 times that number until you get it down so where you know how heavy to spray it before its going to run. A good thing with this though is that you can sand out the run and most of the time it will sand and buff out. Painting is definetly an art and not everybody can do it. There are guys that graduated with me for autobody and still cant lay a paint job without striping the base and running the clear. Fortunetly, I got it after my second or third try.


Every paint job is only as good as its prep work. you do a half a$$ prep and masking your going to get a half a$$ paint job

 

The best deal you'll find on getting stuff painted, is ask around and see if any of your friends know some out of work painters. Once i get the cash, my friend(professional) is going to paint my car for the cost of the booth rental, paint, and a flat rate of 900 for his profit, not to exceed 2300 dollars, which is a good price for an inside and out complete paintjob, which he will guarantee the quality of.

 

I actually have some for my road rash on my front bumper

Black works for most cars as long as your not spraying anything you can really see, but for that angle, it works good to get rid of that

 

if anything, it looks better than the deep grey gashes on your car

 

Grey would go well with my car... But its the yellow/White ones that I dont like [:'(]