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Hey, it’s Tony. Thank you for watching the video and checking out the blog today. Our topic for this blog is DIY Newbie Tips: Painting a Hardtop and Door Jambs.
We are in the final stages of the project. I’m now mixing our base coat. Like what I always say, it’s a 50/50 mixture. It look a little thick so we’re putting a little bit of reducer.
We’ll then go ahead and put three coats of base on the hard top and two coats on the door jambs. There’s no primer work to cover, so it’s fine to just put two coats on it.
Before we lay on our paint, make sure we blow it off and tack everything down. Remember, you could always tack before your base coat, in between base coats and right before your clear coat.
Never tack between clear coats. Once you start laying clear coat, it gets wet and tacky so you need to keep shooting it.
I’ll be giving this its first light coat. Since it’s just the hard top, we’re going to go over the entire thing. If this was the entire car with a lot of red area, we would just most likely cover the primer areas first.
Watch the way I lay the paint. I’m at a 27-28 psi, spraying with my Warwick 980HE Spray Gun.
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Now, we’re doing our final coat of green. We’re just going to let it set for 20 minutes. Then, we tack it down. Then, we mix our clear coat and shoot our clear.
I’ll be showing you full length painting so please check out the video. Enjoy!
Now, we’re giving our door jambs two coats of green. We don’t have to go crazy over laying our base coat on. We just want to dust it and put the new fresh paint on it.
Now, we’re mixing our House of Kolor USC01 Kosmic Klear. This is great stuff. This coat has very high gloss and low dye back, so it doesn’t really get dull after a couple of weeks.
Even if you’re using cheaper clears, you can always color sand and buff it to pro gloss.
We’re adding a little bit of flake because we added some flake on the car. If it seems light on flake during your second coat, just add another coat on it. You can always adjust the clear coat.
I’m just showing you how I clean my spray gun in the video. Now, I’m tacking down the base coat before your final job. We’ll take all the dust out and a little bit of overspray. Then, we lay our clear coat.
When spraying clear coat, we need to be about 29-30 psi. A little higher pressure than base coat because we want the clear to atomize really well and get a high gloss.
Watch how I do it. I’m not afraid to lay the clear coat on. We’re getting it nice and glossy and make sure to get the inner areas as well since we don’t want to have any dry spots.
Then, we have our final coat of clear. This is going to look really amazing. I always say that unmasking a taped up car is like opening up a Christmas present. LOL!
In essence, it does feel like opening up a Christmas present because you know most of your hardwork is done. You’re left with only the detail work.
The next step is doing detail work such as clean up the moldings, rubber, weatherstripping and do some final color sanding and buffing.
You don’t have to do color sanding and buffing right away. You can do it in a few weeks or months. You can let your paint and clear coat cure for a couple of months then decide to do it. It doesn’t really matter.
If you want to know more about color sanding and buffing, check out the LearnAutoBodyAndPaint VIP Course. I have a lot of videos of it within the program. We have it in the different series such as the Mazda Miata Project, The BMW series, The Rav4 Project and all the complete projects within VIP.
Now, I demonstrate to you how I do the molding. The lenses are a little bit faded, so I masked it up and put some Plast Dip. It’s going to come out really nice and flat black.
Use Triple O or Quadruple O Brillo pads to clean up stainless steel or chrome. It comes out really nice.
It’s Tony from LearnAutoBodyAndPaint. If you’re a newbie and would like to know more about DIY auto body work, grab my FREE 85-Page Auto Body And Paint Manual.
Join me in my weekly live show on my YouTube channel. It’s every Thursday at 9pm Eastern. Let’s talk auto body!
Thank you everyone. I hope you enjoyed the video. Please Like, Share and Subscribe to my videos.
Cheers! Talk soon!
Tony
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