Newbie from Down Under

The $40 paint job;

Background:
Thie idea of re-spraying my car started at the back of my mind a few years ago, and as the "Classic Red" looked more and more like "Sunburnt Pink" I was getting closer to making the jump into re-spraying it no matter what the cost.

Then I stumbled across the moparts forum where there was a post circulating about a "paint job on a budget" where some guy was talking about the $50 paint job that he did on his Charger, and damn it looked great in the pics that he posted.





Testing:
I had a spare bootlid sitting in my garage, so I decided to give it all a try to see if the whole thing was crap or gold.

The paint that was used on the charger is called Tremclad (as sold in Canada) or Rustoleum (as it's sold in the States). The paint is thinned with mineral spirits, applied with a high density foam roller and after seven or so coats and a whole lot of wet sanding, a finish like that of the charger can be achieved. Or so they were saying on the moparts forum....

As you may have guessed, I live in Australia and I had no hope of buying either the Tremclad or the Rustoleum, so I ended up using a local paint called Tremco Metal Armour. I have always thought that black Miatas/MX-5s look like sex on wheels, so I shelled out for a litre of the Gloss Black.

Anyway, after 10 or so coats on my spare bootlid, I was confident and skilled enough to give it a go on my car.

Technique:
I applied the same technique as described on the moparts forum of thinning the paint with the mineral spirits until the mixture was about the same consistency as water. That is really, really thin for paint. As I was doing all of the painting in my dusty garage, I changed the moparts recipe of wet sanding between every second coat, to my recipe of wet sanding after every coat with 1500 grit paper.

Painting:
It would take for ever to go through everything I did with my seven coats of paint, so I'll mainly let the following pics do the talking.

Ready for the first coat









After the first coat







So after doing one coat of paint per day, a week and a bit later my car was looking like this;







As you can see it is quite a transformation over the old "Sunburnt Pink" and I was really happy with the results.

Unfortunately though the paint was prone to water damage and every time that it rained the paint slowly changed from a gloss black to a satin/matt black..... After three months of a typical Aussie winter, the car was a full matt black. It did look pretty cool but I wanted to have a glossy black car.

In the mean time the first moparts "paint job on a budget" thread filled and the new "paint job on a budget - continued" thread started to include peoples experiences of rolling a marine paint called International Brightside.

The Brightside is available in Australia, so I went to the local marine supply store and $37.50 later I had a litre of Brightside Gloss Black. After sanding most of the previous black paint off the car and applying two coats of the Brightside (without using any thinners at all) and using 2 x $1.20 foam rollers, my car looked like this;







Those three shots of the car are before I do the final wet sand and detailing of the car. As you can see there is some orange peel in the paint, but from all of my recent sanding practice, I am expecting to get a near perfect finish from the paint once the last step is finished.

The final work on the car will happen during the first weekend of November, and I will post some more pics of the car later.

Until then, that's the story of my $40 paint job (well, $39.90 in truth).