How much paint?

[glemon]

To paint a car if you are only doing the outside with a urethane basecoat/clearcoat. Car in question is a smallish sports car, a little bigger than an LBC, but not much. I am not changing color. I am thinking a gallon is too much, but is a quart enough? at two quarts the price is over 2/3 what a gallon costs, and at point would probably just buy a gallon. What about a quart of base coat and a gallon of clear, to allow the amateur painter involved to wet sand the inevitable basketball surface smooth?

I have never used a base coat clearcoat to do a whole car before, but after doing some touch up work on several cars with it lately I am finding to the surprise of my rather old school mind that I kind of like it.

 

[Jerry]

I painted two cars in the last 3 years. One was attempted to be basecoat/clearcoat, the other was Urethane one step. I like the one step better. Without a paint booth, the surface of the car caught things floating in the air and I had to repaint doors fenders and eventually gave up on ever getting the clear coat to be a finish coat. Both cars after sanding and polish on the paint look very good. I bought a gallon for the TR3A, and Two quarts for the old mini. I finished the mini paint with the last touch up. There is still paint left for the TR3A if touchup is needed. Don't forget that the paint is toxic and you will need breathing apparatus. A charcoal filter mask will only contain the fumes for about a minute.

 

[glemon]

Thanks Jerry, good to hear from someone who has tried both, if this were a solid color I would probably go single stage, but it is a metallic silver, the one time I tried to do a car in metallic single stage I had a little trouble getting the flakes to lay out the same while laying on wet glossy coats and got the dreaded tiger stripes. I know you can lay the basecoat on a little dryer so I am hoping I can do better with it, coupled with increased awareness of the need to lay the coats on evenly and uniformly. Or I may end up paying someone to spray it, I know a guy who works pretty reasonably.

 

[Jerry]

I have not tried metallic. After reading how sensitive it is to keeping the same distance from the body while spraying, I was scared. But I also found out that you can put clearcoat over the one stage Urethane. One of my cars, I did consider clearcoat after I finally got a nice color on the car. The color I used required 3 coats to get the color consistent. One coat left a green hue in thin places, two coats looked mostly good, but I went for 3 so I would have enough paint to polish. PS: I used a ShopLine paint, but I have no idea of the qualities of the many brands.

 

[CaptRandy]

Just painted outside of 3000 it took a little less than 3 qts. Same color, used Shopline also. Mixed to match at local auto paint store

 

[bob67bgt]

Different Bases cover at different rates. The last car I painted was a TR8 in gold base coat. I used Pro Base from my local NAPA store. I got 2 qts of base and probably just used one of them. I reduced the paint all at once so its hard to tell if I used just over or just under one quart of base. I used NAPAs Acme brand of clear. It is their overall clear coat and not the spot panel clear. It sprays nice and can be color sanded. I did not need to color sand the car and it looks good. It will look a little better if I ever get around to that step. I have tried higher end clears and just do not get the same results as the Acme brand. I tried one higher end clear and got into trouble with it. I did not know it was a wet on wet application. I gave it 20 minutes between coats. I ended up re-clearing the car. I used about 2 qts of clear and there is lots of material on the car to color sand it. Now if you spray it on like stucco then you will take off a lot to get it looking smooth. Good luck with your project.
Bob

 

[glemon]

Thanks Bob

 

[BlueMax]

Now days with materials and equipment you will find out theirs a big different with apples and oranges when it comes to results.



For myself I wanted a base/clear paint job. I also wanted a material quality paint that will last decades. I also wanted to be able to color match perfectly with out having to fear that I would not have a perfect match every time if needed.

When mixing colors the paint manufactures have their tinting base colors. These colors have to be perfect when the blending of colors are mixed base off their specific gravity/weights to give the colors you see today.. If you have pearls or metallics their also weigh in to give your finale color.


But what happens some times is the scales can get uncelebrated and you'll get color errors in the mix. So when selecting a color for my car I selected to paint my car with the tinting base because the color is so highly scrutinized through spectrometers at the factory that the color is perfect every time before it goes to canning and market.

Also your spray guns are now so finely machined to properly atomize the material before it exits the much smaller nozzle when applying your base coat which doesn't give you very much build. The build is created in your clears that are sprayed with a different gun that has a slightly larger nozzle.

Material cost today for high quality paints have gone through the roof. Some reds are $3,000+ per gallon and if you add mother of pearl that cost can be $5,000 per gallon. And then you've got different quality clears to deal with too, not all clears are the same. And last, your hardeners and your ambient temperature thinners to must be properly selected.

Paint booths are a necessity when your looking for a high quality paint job. My Healey was painted to these standards and the results and outcome was excellent.

 

[glemon]

FYI, if anyone is curious or can use the information, I used slightly less than half gallon of epoxy primer surfacer, and the paint shop guy used about a half gallon of basecoat on the car, don't really know how much clear it took, this was for a Porsche 924, probably slightly larger sirface area than your average Triumph or MG, but not much (a lot of glass on these cars), this was entire outside of the car and both sides of the hood.