SHINTON
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2005
- Location
- Triad area of NC
I wrote this article YEARS ago for Off-Road.com and it has been long enough I cannot find it or link to it any more so I feel safe in posting my content here now.
I will try to put up before / after pictures as well but for now, here is the written content.
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Cheap Paint Job:
Just like painting a room in your home, you will find that taping a vehicle is time consuming and will often take longer than the actual painting! In our case we removed the gas tank filler/license plate holder and tail lights. I had a set of fender flares that were already off the Jeep, and you can choose to either tape up yours or remove them to get a cleaner job. I left my rocker guards on the Jeep since I was painting them the same color as the rest of the YJ, but before installing them we did shoot underneath them with a fresh coat of primer.
I had literally scraped every inch of this body with a scrap blade, removing the camouflage paint, but we still need to sand the body before shooting the primer. We used 180 & 220 grit sandpaper to make sure the primer will stick to the old paint. This was one of the steps missing in the previous camouflage paint job and the main reason it was literally flaking off!
Note: you can use 80 to 220 grit over bondo and old paint assuming you are priming the vehicle, 320, 360 or 400 before painting the body]
If your old paint sands “smooth” then it is ok to paint over it with this paint, and you can skip the primer step. However, if your paint is various colors (in my case, blue, old primers, etc), you will want to primer the entire body to get an ‘even color’ before painting. Again, with my rig, I had green fenders, yellow doors, blue body with some gray primer thrown in, so I needed that primer coating.
At this point, we finished taping off the headlights, front/rear bumpers, windshield and interior. For the “cleanest” possible job you can purchase clean white paper for taping, but Dad has been using newspaper for years and it seems to work fine. You are “risking” that the ink from the paper could seep onto whatever you are taping off.
In our case, we simply use the “masking” tape you find at the store and usually use some in ¾” to 1” widths. We do NOT use the cheapest possible tape in this case, but a “name brand”, simply because it sticks better and the super cheap stuff doesn’t want to hold as well. For example, on a windshield, we take the tape and stick about ½ of it on the newspaper and the other half is left for running along the edges. Any excess simply gets folded/tucked and taped out of the way.
If you are doing a “true show car” the taping is much more important and you will see them use the “blue tape” which sticks good and has a smaller chance of pulling off the paint from the area you are taping off. This is a rig built to take off-road and masking tape and newspaper worked just fine!
We covered the work areas with acrylic lacquer primer and let it dry. You will need to put down however many coats it takes to “fill” old sand marks or file marks. Usually a couple coats will do this.
NOTE: Lacquer primer 4 parts to 1 part thinner
In our case, we actually painted the rig in a gray primer and then drove it for several months in primer gray. I had several trips I wanted to make and there was a good chance I could end up with body damage so we figured we would wait until those were over and as luck would have it I didn’t receive any body damage until AFTER the new paint job!
I will try to put up before / after pictures as well but for now, here is the written content.
---
Cheap Paint Job:
Just like painting a room in your home, you will find that taping a vehicle is time consuming and will often take longer than the actual painting! In our case we removed the gas tank filler/license plate holder and tail lights. I had a set of fender flares that were already off the Jeep, and you can choose to either tape up yours or remove them to get a cleaner job. I left my rocker guards on the Jeep since I was painting them the same color as the rest of the YJ, but before installing them we did shoot underneath them with a fresh coat of primer.
I had literally scraped every inch of this body with a scrap blade, removing the camouflage paint, but we still need to sand the body before shooting the primer. We used 180 & 220 grit sandpaper to make sure the primer will stick to the old paint. This was one of the steps missing in the previous camouflage paint job and the main reason it was literally flaking off!
Note: you can use 80 to 220 grit over bondo and old paint assuming you are priming the vehicle, 320, 360 or 400 before painting the body]
If your old paint sands “smooth” then it is ok to paint over it with this paint, and you can skip the primer step. However, if your paint is various colors (in my case, blue, old primers, etc), you will want to primer the entire body to get an ‘even color’ before painting. Again, with my rig, I had green fenders, yellow doors, blue body with some gray primer thrown in, so I needed that primer coating.
At this point, we finished taping off the headlights, front/rear bumpers, windshield and interior. For the “cleanest” possible job you can purchase clean white paper for taping, but Dad has been using newspaper for years and it seems to work fine. You are “risking” that the ink from the paper could seep onto whatever you are taping off.
In our case, we simply use the “masking” tape you find at the store and usually use some in ¾” to 1” widths. We do NOT use the cheapest possible tape in this case, but a “name brand”, simply because it sticks better and the super cheap stuff doesn’t want to hold as well. For example, on a windshield, we take the tape and stick about ½ of it on the newspaper and the other half is left for running along the edges. Any excess simply gets folded/tucked and taped out of the way.
If you are doing a “true show car” the taping is much more important and you will see them use the “blue tape” which sticks good and has a smaller chance of pulling off the paint from the area you are taping off. This is a rig built to take off-road and masking tape and newspaper worked just fine!
We covered the work areas with acrylic lacquer primer and let it dry. You will need to put down however many coats it takes to “fill” old sand marks or file marks. Usually a couple coats will do this.
NOTE: Lacquer primer 4 parts to 1 part thinner
In our case, we actually painted the rig in a gray primer and then drove it for several months in primer gray. I had several trips I wanted to make and there was a good chance I could end up with body damage so we figured we would wait until those were over and as luck would have it I didn’t receive any body damage until AFTER the new paint job!
