Painting a Car

Painting a car

Painting a car has long been considered more of an art than a mechanical skill. In fact, a misconception that a "paint job" is a single step process is common; painting a car is really a multi-step process that leads up to the actual painting of the car. It takes hours of sanding and preparing the body for paint. Being a good painter also requires a lot of patience. So can the average person paint their car? All that is really needed to painting a car is proper preparation, artistic skill, and plain old "elbow grease".

The first and most important step in painting is to prepare the car for paint. This involves sanding the body of the car. The purpose for sanding is to get out all of the imperfections such as scratches and chips in the paint. The best option is to work in steps; Step one requires using coarse grit sandpaper, step two using medium grit and step three using fine grit. The reason for these steps when sanding is to reduce the time sanding the car than necessary. When done right the surface of your car should be very smooth with no scratches and ready to begin paint.

The painting process itself requires great skill. This stage requires spraying primer, color, and then clear coat. The first step is spraying primer. Primer is what helps the colored paint stick to the smooth surface of the car. In most cases only one layer of primer is needed. Once the primer has dried, you can start spraying the color. About two or three layers of paint is needed. Also between each layer of paint you will want to let it dry for ten to fifteen minutes before spraying another layer. Once the last layer of paint has dried wait about thirty -ninety minutes for the paint to dry completely. Spraying the clear coat is very tricky and if not sprayed with caution can cause runs in the paint. Which is like seeing syrup run down the sides of pancakes. Also if this happens you will have to start back at the beginning to sanding and do this process over again.