Painting a car at home sounds so easy. You paint it, enjoy it, and then go about your merry way. The reality, though, is more involved–way more involved. So while readers keep asking us for a real “paint your car at home” story, to be honest, we’ve struggled a bit to come up with one.
Why? Because modern paints are a dichotomy. They’re better than ever, giving terrific results and making them very accessible for amateur painters, but they need to be used exactly as intended. They’re also not inexpensive, which creates a price barrier for amateur painters. Add in the need for some specialized equipment and various regulations at the federal, state and local level, and it simply becomes difficult to write a story about painting at home.
Nonetheless, this is GRM, and we can’t let you down. We’ve been painting at home for about 30 years. Lately we’ve been using the professionals a bit more, but we’ve also kept up with the times and still do some work at home. While the days of $200 at-home paint jobs are long gone, it’s still possible to put down some professional-quality paintwork for less than $1000 in materials and around $500 in equipment.
Of course, paint is only the frosting. The metalwork, bodywork and prep are the cake, so we’re breaking this down into three stories. In this first one, we’ll cover how to assess the car, strip bad work, and apply filler. Next we’ll get into priming, block sanding and fine-tuning the bodywork. Finally, we’ll lay some modern basecoat/clearcoat paint, wet sand it, and buff it out.
We’ll be performing all the work on the S52-swapped, E30-chassis BMW that was the subject of our High School Hotrod series. This is how we made it pretty on a budget.
