Steve's House of Paint, Take 1

It's been a while... but I've been working on this for a while.  I wish it were done already, but it's not.  It is getting there, though.  This is the story of my first attempt.

First things first: This is my friend Ray.  He's helping me with the paint job.  He knows his stuff.

Day 1: March 10th

We started around 10am, getting everything ready.  We started with epoxy primer, 2 coats.  It came out ok.  I mean, it's primer.  What else is it supposed to look like?

 

From there, we moved on to the surfacer primer.  Again, it looked pretty good to my untrained eye.  Two more coats.  It seemed a little scratchy to me, but it did smooth out after going over with a scuff pad.

 

 

 

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Let me tell you, there's a lot of surfaces to paint for such a small car.  We sprayed inside and out, top and bottom.

We didn't get as far as I'd hoped--I was hoping to get a coat of base color sprayed too.  But again, it's my first day.  I also found a couple of defects to fix with spot putty--more on that later.

Day 2: March 11th

Day 2 started out well, but quickly went downhill.  Why? Because of an accident.

I had built these hanging racks to hold the parts to make it easier to spray.  They held up ok, but started sagging quite a bit over time.  Still, they were working... until we moved things one last time to prepare to spray the body.  Then: disaster.  One of the racks separated on one side, and the passenger's front wing and the front valance hit the floor, hard.

 

I was crushed, just like them.  But it could have been insanely worse.  The damage ended up being minor and easily repaired.

After a few minutes with my head between my legs, we moved on to base coat.  This didn't go nearly as well as we had hoped.  We sprayed the doors, bonnet and the undamaged wing with a couple of coats.  It did NOT cover well at all.  Here's a couple of examples.

  

After two coats, it should have been pretty much the right color, but it was splotchy.  I also found what must have been a million pinholes and scratches that the base coat magnified.

I will say this, though.  In the few places it covered properly, the color is beautiful.  It's going to look great.

Boy, was I disappointed.  All that work, and it looked terrible.  And I had stuff to fix, too.  I was depressed for almost a week, and I couldn't bear to write about it.

Fear not, it gets better--stay tuned for our next episode!