Paint Your Car For $750
A Professional Paint Job Is Becoming More Expensive Every Day, But You Can Get Good Results By Doing Most Of The Work Yourself. We'll Show You How.
A third option is to find a local post-high-school vocational center that offers autobody classes. For very affordable tuition fees, you can enroll in a night or weekend class, use the school's tools, and learn bodywork and paint techniques from professional instructors. The advantage of using the school over a rented paint booth is that for very little money, you get to use the school's facilities for a longer period of time. It's also possible to sign up for consecutive semesters where you can perform all the bodyworking and painting tasks at the school. This is especially helpful if you're just getting started and don't own the necessary tools. Paradis offered up the school's paint booth, and we even talked him into shooting the car for us. We also photographed this month's cover at the school. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Paradis and Assistant Principal of Operations Luis Lopez for allowing Car Craft the use of their facility. If you'd like to learn more about body and paint work and live in the vicinity of the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles, you should look into the school's automotive curriculum.
Paint Choices
Before we began this repaint project, our goal was to do this with the best results for the least investment. Sure, there are those paint-your-car-with-a-roller-for-$100 opportunities, but we prefer to paint the traditional way--with a gun. Our first decision was to go with a single-stage paint to keep a lid on price by reducing the amount of product required for purchase. Brand loyalty and experience with a given product go a long way toward making a paint decision, but for this job, Eastwood's new line of paint looked interesting without the bewildering selection of different paint products. For example, Eastwood's single-stage urethane paint could also be used as a two-stage just by adding the clear and its catalyst over the color.
Eastwood sells its paint a little differently than most companies in that mixing the color with the activator creates a full gallon. This makes mixing paint easy because the amount of paint is matched to the amount of activator in an easy 3:1 ratio.
Paradis suggested getting 2 gallons of paint (including the activator) to ensure we had enough coverage, especially since we were also painting the doorjambs and the inside of the trunk lid. The plan was to shoot two coats of paint, including the jambs. Our goal was just a basic paint job because our Chevelle was destined for lots of track and shop abuse. We sprayed two coats applied about 10 to 15 minutes apart. If we wanted to color-sand the car, an additional coat would have given us more material to work with to create the desired gloss appearance. Of course, the optimal approach would have been to shoot several coats of clear over the base color, which would have produced a sufficiently thick clearcoat we could then have color-sanded to a high-gloss finish.
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