FINALLY: finished my paint

[elskeptico]

With the help of a very dedicated friend (and guidance from many here), I finally got this thing painted. Some issues with the clear, but will cut and buff it and hope for the best. Even as is, I'm thrilled with the results, and I like the color even more than I thought I would.

[Ristow]

looks real good.

[MysticRob]

I'm Sgt Shultz'ing here (I see nothing!).

[Full Size Jeeper]

Damn, that color is unbelievable, what is it called, it is perfect on you wide track!!!!!

[johnsonic]

Looks amazing! What did you do about the firewall & interior bits? I'm wanting to go from gold to a similar color, so kind of in the same boat!

Drooling - really looks awesome!

[MysticRob]

I see it now, beautiful!
Looks a bit like legend lime from a 60s mustang, and I've always been a fan of that color, especially when I almost got my hands on a factory GT fastback with the 390 big block and 4 on the floor.

[elskeptico]

Thanks guys. The color is called Desert Sage.

I didn't fuss with the firewall, but I painted everything I could otherwise reasonably access, which included much of the engine compartment. Not much of the yellow remains.

I did paint the interior, everything that will show. I'll share more pics as I get to the reassembly.

I've been working toward this in earnest since about April, when I started taking it all apart. Since then I cut out all the rust (3 of the 4 flares were totally shot), welded in new steel, pounded out dents, sanded out NUMEROUS small rust spots, treated some areas with Ospho, epoxy primed, fixed several areas with filler, epoxied again. In the final two days, my friend and I built the booth, set up a big blower and duct, painted the interior, shot primer surfacer, block sanded until our arms fell off, shot the green base, remasked and shot the black, then finally shot the clear coat. That last two days was actually a marathon of 28 hours straight with breaks for food. Yeah, that's a good friend I have. We're still laughing about it.

[Kaiserjeeps]

That is an outstanding color! Be sure and post up more progress pictures. Now you have us all baited and hooked.

[letank]

very nice color pick....

we need to see your set up.... I am due for a paint job, and not willing to pay SF bay area prices of over $10K.

[Artsifrtsi1]

Oooo... Purdy!

[elskeptico]

Well my setup was not pretty. I know most pros would wince at the sight of it, and yet it was good enough for what I wanted. Because of our compressed timeline for getting this done, we had to cut a few corners with the booth and due to sleep deprivation we just plain forgot a few basic things, like wetting the ground before spraying.

All that said I’ll post some pics and details of what we did.

[Tripwire]

nice - first time painting? yea i had clearcoat issues, not runs but a tad to thin in places but the rig looks great !!!! love the color

steve

[iharding]

That looks amazing. Great color!

[elskeptico]

The compliments are appreciated! I just typed this out and now realize how long it is. I guess you can just check out the photos and ignore my rambling.

PICS HERE: https://imgur.com/a/8pTElnV

This was my first time painting. I've done minor body work before but nothing like this. I first got "serious" about painting this thing back in about 2011 when I bought a book about it and read it. At that time we lived in a house with a single driveway and it wasn't the best place to work on a car let alone paint one. The next year we had our first child, so that put off any serious projects for a while (I also used to brew beer haha).

Around 2017 we bought a house with an actual 2-car garage and I knew I'd eventually be painting in it. Well the house needed lots of work, so that occupied my "free" time and the garage space for most of 3 years. Finally got the new house nice and livable and made room in the garage. Lo and behold, COVID hit and next thing I knew I was working from home full time (I'm lucky to be in that position), with quite a bit of free time from not commuting two hours every day. So first I did fuel injection, which was cool, and then I started taking it apart. I wanted to actually spray it in late summer when it was still warm. All the rust removal and heavy body work took longer than I had hoped, but finally I just picked a date, made sure my buddy could be there that weekend to help, and worked my butt off to get everything prepped by then.

As for paint, I chose a PPG waterborne base, which was really great stuff to work with. As a primer surfacer, we used EPW115 Speedprime, which was also good stuff. And our clear was DC4010, which was billed as a high quality clear with good UV resistance. None of this was cheap, but this is likely a once in a lifetime thing for me, so I don't care.

The plan was to paint the interior first and clear coat it to get it out of the way, which we did, but I used a rattle can clear so not to waste the good stuff on interior. Then we started spraying the primer surfacer and sanding. The sanding took forever and ever. Part of the reason was that my Jeep had lots of little rust spots on it that I had just gone around and lightly sanded away. I should have use filler or spot putty on those, but I thought a high build or primer surfacer would take care of it. The primer we used took care of a lot of it, but it required lots of sanding. We started block sanding around 3pm Saturday and didn't finish until around 4-5am Sunday. We just kept going. We wanted to do all the sanding outside and move it into the booth for the rest, but the sanding went so late that we had to do some sanding inside, but we did our best to blow out the dust after sanding was done.

For the booth, I found an "explosion proof" blower fan which came with a long exhaust duct. Varying opinions on if this type of fan is necessary, but I didn't want to take changes in my garage and I found it used on craigslist, good deal. My garage has a small space walled off at the back where we cut a hole in the wall and mounted the fan, then we routed the duct out and up to the roof where I hoped the nasty stuff would drift off unnoticed into the atmosphere. For intake, I removed a couple of the little plastic windows from the garage door and taped in some HVAC filters.


We initially planned to wrap the entire inside garage space with plastic and tape all the seams, but everything took so long and we were so tired that we did the minimum there and just wrapped the walls. I wish we had done better here cause I think crud was occasionally falling from all my junk stored in the rafters, but oh well. The wrapping we did do protected the important stuff from overspray, good enough.


They tell you to wet down the floor to keep dust down and ground the chassis to prevent electrostatic charge. Again, in our exhausted state we just forgot to do these things. Dumb.

Spraying the base went really well, even with metallics, it covered nice and even and we didn't notice anything weird. Apparently with metallics often they won't lay down right and you need to do a "control coat" at the end. We didn't need to do this and it all looks great to me. Maybe because it's a darker color.

When we started spraying the clear, it took a lot longer and didn't want to do on evenly. We did one whole side before realizing we should try a bigger fluid tip. So I changed from a 1.3 to a 1.4mm and that made all the difference. It was coming out much faster and seemed to be building appropriately, but I think we moved a little too fast on the other side and ended up with some "die back" of the clear on that side. Hoping to fix that soon by cutting/buffing, but anyway it still looks good.

So that's about it. I've got lots more notes on stuff like seam sealer, etc. if anyone's interested.

[DarkMonohue]

Man, that looks sharp. Nice choice. There are always things you look back on and realize you could have done differently, but it sure looks good from here.

You said it's called Desert Sage. I guess the obvious question is whose color is it? In other words, if I were to walk into a paint store on trainee week and talk to the dumbest stool-warmer behind the counter, what would I have to tell him in order for him to find that paint for me?