Winter Project "Maybe" Paint the stealth

[BigTyla]

If it's not too much darker you could easily get away without spraying the entire car.

Painting is not hard. In fact it's quite easy. It's the prep work you need to worry about.

[Boomer3000]

Right, every person that I have talked to has told me prep is 90% of the work.

[sketch]

I actually was just in a similar scenario - I went from beat up red to a satin black (I wish I had gone flat(ter), but that's for another thread).

I did it all on my own with no other previous experience painting a car. I took a full week off from work to do it, and let me tell you, it's all in the prep. I took my time and didn't even finish in the whole week. I didn't want to rush anything, and for the most part it paid off.

At least 98% of my time was spent doing prep work. I basically stripped the car down to do it, took off both the front and rear bumpers, both doors, side skirts, A-pillars, sail panels, hood, trunk, fenders, etc. I didn't want any jams or any other visible parts to still show as red (not counting what's under the hood, as that's now the only part of the car that isn't black)

I've already got a couple decent air compressors at home so I grabbed one of those, bought a paint gun on Amazon and researched paint for a bit before I settled on what I ended up with. Did a bit of reading re: HVLP spray guns and watched a couple videos on youtube before I got to work (it's definitely a bit of an art and science, I was by no means amazing with it but with the proper patience good results can be achieved.)

You can find a few pictures of what I started with and what I ended with on my sail conversion thread here http://www.3sgto.org/f20/3000gt-stea...sion-6422.html (only small glimpses of what I started out with, the major extent of the body work was on the passenger side)

I've actually been meaning to start a thread documenting my whole process, maybe it's a good time to get on that...

But like Tyla says, it's all prep prep prep prep prep. It pays off in the end, big time. If you cut corners, it shows. There are a few blemishes on mine that I need to redo because of lacking prep