$50 paint
Cheap paint job

humm turned out pretty good... Good read!!!

Sounds wicked. You should do that when you colour-change the Lexus, Kev...

Holy crap.... makes you think eh?

I wonder how many people are going.. "hmmm... I COULD use a new paint job.. and I'm not doing anything on this weekend...."

I know I am thinking about it.. my roof could use a good paintjob

I have been following the thread on moparts.org for a while now. Bought a can of black Tremclad and the rest of the supplies a month ago and was going to paint my hood this weekend. Since it is a white hood on a blue car, there is nothing to lose.

It's technically doing the same thing as a spray gun/compressor. It's thin, it runs but the main difference is time. I can spray a car with one coat in under 20 minutes (taking my sweet time). Rolling and sanding and rolling could take weeks to get right.

I've spent alot of time reading through the various threads on this because I was thinking about trying it out. It's been discussed in detail on pretty much every car board except this one (so far )

In the end, you're basically saving on:
-equipment costs: don't need air compressor, HVLP spray gun, etc.
-paint costs, although that's probably a negligible difference
-setup time: don't need to setting up the garage for spray, masking surrounding parts, etc

This sounds good, but in exchange you get to spend WAY more time sanding / wet sanding / polishing.

Some of the results look very good indeed, but a few that I've seen seem to need repolishing to restore the brightness in the paint once in a while.

I wonder how well it would work and hold up on urethane parts over time, like our bumpers (not sure how flexible the paint is). And I also wonder whether it would stand up to the elements as good as modern automotive paints do.

In the end a pretty cool option to have in the bag of tricks! I'd personally prefer to spend a little more and have a pro do the spraying after I've done all the body / prep work.

You save quite a bit on the paint. Automotive paint and reducer is expensive. It cost just over 20 bucks for a quart of Tremclad, and $150 for an equivalent amount of automotive paint a couple of years ago.

The real problem with Tremclad is the limited colour selection, and of course you can't roll on metallics.

Not to mention, time is free. I would personally rather spend time than money. Your days off... sure, why not?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but to get a professional to do it, most of your costs are time/labour rather than materials.

If you were to repaint your car, stock color (lets say black) you're looking at maybe 6-800 in materials, the other 1200-1500 in labour/prep.

Once again, greater than 50% is time.

I agree with Ryan on this. Most auto invoices are 60-80% labour costs.

Stumbling onto this is quite interesting. I've booked time for me Mid August to start this project.

As far as poor variety of colors...couldn't you mix it? Yellow + Red = Orange? What colors are missing?

N

Write down the exact formula you used to mix your colour or you'll never match it again later if you have to fix a spot.

There are a couple dozen different colours, and yes you can mix them. But as Nick said, you better have your formula down exact.

If your car is white or black you should be OK, but I think all other DSMs have metallic paint? So, the problem is that there are no metallic Tremclad rust paints, and rolling on wouldn't work anyway if there was. If you are willing to change your colour from stock then this isn't an issue.

A friend of mine did this on his RX 7 and it turned out really good. Nice and shiney too. It actually works really good if you take your time with it.

Acrylic gives you a certain 'look'. Not as nice as base/clear. Works well enough if you're on a budget, though.

Actually one of the best reasons to use this type of paint is for touchup purposes. I was in the process of painting with this type of paint. I was using case impelment paint, which a buddy got me (he paints this stuff on machinery etc). He has an older hotrod done up in it too. Anytime he gets a scratch, he just fills a touchup gun, and then sands+polishes it back. No clear.




If you do the math, it's still a good idea to go buy a decent 60 gallon compressor, a half-assed hvlp gun (or normal even) and then spray your own. You can get all the hardware, and build a cheapass booth like I did, and still save money over a paint job. Then you get air in your garage and save yourself time every time you work on any car. Also. DA orbital sanders need tons of air.