[Jonny042]

Originally Posted by Showdown

I’ll be honest, I’m tempted to vote for others’ builds too- yours for sure!

The plan for paint is to build an enclosure around the car with 4mil plastic- basically a little spray room. The overhead door will be open and exhaust fans will pull the air out while fans on the other side will bring air in.

Before I had my exhausted spray “room” that’s what I did and it was pretty effective. Plastic on the floor is key though!

I have a pretty nice HVLP system with an inest awata gun and feel that if I can get the gun dialed for paint as opposed to the varnish I normally spray it *should* cut down on the amount of sanding I need to do. The reality is that I’ll probably be doing a lot of sanding one way or another.

Seeing Gabe’s work on the Avocado helps build confidence but I’ll be honest; I’m still pretty anxious about it.

It's easy to underestimate how much overspray there will be but it sounds like you can deal with it. As you were!!!

It's actually convenient to paint a 911 in parts, the biggest one being the roof. You can do a soft edge mask at the drip rail, and paint the cowl and roof as one, each quarter panel/rocker as one, hood, front fenders, bumpers etc. all in batches.

I'm a terrible painter, but a great sander. You can adjust your gun such that there's a bit less overspray than there would be otherwise - this comes at the expense of atomisation and the finish will be wavy compared to a "pro" job in a booth.

I painted my car twice trying to achieve the surface finish I wanted. The prep for the 2nd round of paint started around page 9 of my build :

Originally Posted by Jonny042

I now officially no longer have fingerprints. And obviously it's not from typing!!

Now this is all a learning process for me, as I have never tried to produce paint results that were perfect. Lots of perfectly acceptable work but not show car standard. My wife has a black yamaha piano with a pretty well done finish. That's my target. So your results may vary, and your experience will be different, I'm just going over my trials and tribulations and maybe it will help someone avoid the same mistakes if they are looking for similar results.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I'm a mediocre painter, at best, but I'm really good at sanding..... perhaps a little too good. As time went on I kept finding thin spots in the paint that revealed my lack of talent with a spray gun.

Also, lesson learned, I used a bit of wet on wet sealer, here and there, as a final step prior to painting, on the odd edge or high spot that came trhough on my final 600 grit sanding. Wet on wet sealer is not a great idea, if you have a super smooth, nicely sanded finish, then you spray a sealer on then paint on top of it, you are spraying colour on a slightly textured surface in those spots, and I swear every single spot (probably a half a dozen places) that I used the W.O.W. Sealer I ended up with it peeking through after just looking at the spot with sandpaper in my hand. Note to self, no more of that!!!

Not that long ago I posted about how I decided to pull the car into natural light, and MAN did it look good.





I guess I was trying to convince myself to leave it alone but it didn't work. 99% of people would touch up the spots and get on with building the car but I couldn't do it!!

So this happened.....



I decided I should go back to the drawing board. Turns out the paint store is on the way to the drawing board. The paint store is an expensive place, but they always seem happy to see me. Note that I buy nearly as much sandpaper as I do paint. So I am stuck in a never ending cycle of sand/paint/repeat that is good for their bottom line.

I had a few different problems with the paint (not including the aforementioned never to be repeated wet-on-wet sealer issues)

1. - My colour sanding process (the first time) was: dry with 1200 grit (dry was easier to see when I got all the glossy low spots out), then 1500 (wet), then 3000 (wet) then compound, then polish. I decided on these steps based on a bunch of research, testing, and prior experiences. I now know that doing this will get you paint that looks incredible. Really, really nice. In comparison it made our 2017 Golf R look like it was painted with a roller. BUT..... looking closely at reflections, there was still a waviness to the surface. Seems this is sometimes refered to as "urethane wave" but whatever it is I couldn't stand for it. I am 99% sure this is the lingering influence of the texture of the original surface. Because I used a DA sander (6" and 3") for the sanding I was careful to use a soft interface pad. Works for matching texture on collision work (and rust repair on beaters) and for getting rid of dust nibs but not the hot setup for truly outstanding paint.

2. Orange peel in places the sun don't shine. I have no intention of wet sanding and polishing my door jambs, but was unhappy with the spraying I did in these areas. I mentioned my lack of painting skill..... here's a pic of me sanding out the peel with a guide coat prior to repainting.....



Mind you the guide coat amplifies the texture (which is why it's so useful, more on that later!) this was actually a pretty nice finish, but not up to my expectations.

3. Uneven coverage - I had some thin spots and poor coverage in areas, especially some trick spots. Here's a particularly bad spot (after prep for paint part duex)



I also had some issues with coverage inside the drip rails. More on that (and my solution) later.

4. "Marring" from compounding - I was having difficulty getting a perfectly clear and smooth finish after the compounding step - I've since learned I was probably not careful enough with my pads, and should be cleaning them more often, and seasoning them better to make sure I am not introducing issues to the paint - I was getting defects that would be best described as microscopic peel - actually only visible if I have my reading glasses on BTW. Difficult to photograph.....