Another Rustoleum $100 paint job

[Yroundrdn]

'laying down' is the paint flattening / smoothing out before it dries or hardens. With water- or volatile-based paints, weather conditions, sunlight, dry air etc can cause it to dry out before the paint has time to smooth out. That premature drying is sometimes called 'flashing'

Combined with spray gun settings that use too much air to paint mix, or atomize the paint too much - and combined with hot dry air - and you can get paint that almost dries before you get it on or worse poor coverage that requires too many passes to build up and can inadvertently lead to runs as you keep adding paint trying to build up a decent coat. It's easy to overdo things and make a mess.

Many of the same concerns and issues are experienced with various clear coatings in woodworking. I do a lot of woodworking and painting projects with all sorts of materials and here in SoCal and with CA's restrictions on good 'VOC' materials, and mostly workign in my garage, I have a very narrow calendar window and times of day where I can get really good results. That time window is closing now, rest of the summer-fall it's a very few morning hours before things warm up and never during a 'santa ana' condition.

It's tough to control conditions painting anything outside of a paint booth. So you try to control whatever you can to get a better result.


I'm going to be trying to paint my hood and my doors at home in my garage in the next couple months. Take them off, mount them on a rolling frame, do all the prep, clean them off and roll them into an improvised paint booth in my garage, rest overnight and try to shoot them in the early morning hours. Only way I can get decent results in the summer here.

Oh ya, checked it closer today, definitely not smooth but I could sand that out if I wanted. Given my in-experience, I probably had some settings wrong with the gun as well. I wouldn't do this on my classic cars but on many of our overland vehicles it is a good option.

 

[rayra]

OP: Looks great!!!

Rayra, FYI, "Basic Black" is going to be very hard to get to look nice... EVERY bit of prep work you skimp on, and every dent or ding you miss will show. White is the best color to paint, IMO, because imperfections don't really show. I will NOT paint anything darker than red, and even that was tough. White, sand, khaki, silver, gray, no problem. Darker colors require too much detail work for me to want to take them on.

I did our Comanche with Sand Rustoleum several years ago. It's a little chalky on the hood and roof, but the rest still looks good. If I buffed out the hood and roof, and put some wax on it, it would probably look great again... I keep thinking I might want to spray the whole thing in matte clear though... Ah, some other day. I'm supposed to be building a hose this year, so non-essential vehicle work is out.

oh I know. Vehicle is black, sort of stuck with it. I owned a black off-road vehicle decades ago and regretted it. White pickup for decades. After more than a year of hunting for a used Sub that met my mechanical condition criteria and budget and not finding it, I finally did but it was black. I bought it anyway, just the get the search over with. And within a month I'd washed ti more than I'd washed my pickup in a year.
But it is what is is. So the paint repairs need to be black. Mentioned earlier, I've personally painted a couple vehicles, I know what it takes. Why I'm not looking forward to it. Buried a few months back in my build topic is some discussion about doing the whole thing in beige monsterliner. But I've got a gray interior and it won't look great / factory no matter what I choose to do. So the least-worst is going black again. And given how shabby some of the panels are right now, it will only look better.