I'm going to start fixing the exterior of my car and I'm trying to decide on a total respray or just doing some touch up. For the most part, the paint seems to be in decent shape other than the typical scratches and dulling. As far as removing dents and rust I can do the body work but I suck at painting so a friend is going to help me out. He does his own paint when he builds motorcycles and he does some dead sexy paint work, I figure a car can't be much different, jsut bigger. I've got some rust to fix on the rockers and rear quarters, but I can't decide on simply repainting the areas that are getting repaired and buff the rest of the car or doing all new paint. If I do a total respray do I have to strip the entire car or can I just prep the car and do the primer and paint over he original paint? I don't want a show car finish just wanna make it decent.
you need to at least sand the top clear coat off, so the primer and paint have something to adhere to.
That's what I was thinking but I just wanted to make sure. I know Maaco and places like that do it that way a lot of the time, but the only good paint job I sever aw at Maaco was what my buddy at the local one did on my Buick, and that was after I completely stripped the car (media blast), did all the prep work and trailered the car to him. All he had to do was clean the primer and spray the color and clear. I don't have the time or the resources to do that with this car (stripping a car to bare metal by hand is a big pain) so if I can either salvage the original paint or just respray over it that would be better.
your probally better off sanding the clear coat off the whole car and just panting a coat or two of paint over the whole car untill it matches and then panting the clear coat on. Its still going to take a lot of time, but any way you look at it unless you do so chessy paint job it's going to take a while.
Johnny doesn't do cheesy. I want it to look presentable. I mean, it'll never be a show car but I take pride in having 200K miles on a car that still looks as good as it runs.
Okay, I was going to post this earlier but I had to take care of something. So anyway... Last night one of my friends came over and we debadged the car. While we were at it we messed around with some detail spray and some buffing compound. The majority of the paint seems to be in better shape than I thought. I'm no expert but he thinks we could do some wet sanding to get most of the scratches out, and sue an orbital buffer to bring the shine back. Touch up the rock chips, fix the rusted areas and blend the new paint into the factory coat, it should, in his opinion anyway, look decent when it's done. Maybe that's the best route to take?
