I'm going to attempt to paint my car in the driveway. I have a HVLP gun and I am 99% sure I'll be painting it Blitz Black. I dont have access to a booth, and my garage has a real crappy concrete floor that holds dust and dirt. Can I even hope to spray outside with decent results? I would really like to paint it with a nice HOK or other quality paint, but think without a proper booth I'd be wasting money? Any advice? The car is a low buck 50 Chevy coupe and I'm really trying to watch my costs.
"Low Buck" & "HOK" don't belong in the same sentence together. If you're going with HOK know how to paint - or find someone who does - and rent a booth. Now if you're shooting something cheap, the driveway would work. You still might be better off to spend a week cleaning the garage and shooting it in there though. JH
I've seeen make shift spray boothe made uot of those portable car tents, and tarps. I think I alot of place wet down the floor to keep dust down also.
You can get a decent driveway job if you pick the right time of year and the right weather conditions: 1) Springtime - right before the trees pop their leaves 2) Temp - above 65 deg F. 3) Wind - light 4) humidity - high. Ideally, paint right after a rainstorm. I've had best lugh thataway. Hose down the driveway to keep the dust down. Don't expect perfect results, cuz crap WILL get in the paint and you'll hafta work it out!
IF worst comes to worst I have prepped cars in the driveway and sent them to the local Maaco. If prepped nicely, and MASK it off yourself first (at least all the joints where window trim etc joins with the body) you can actually get decent results pretty cheap. Last car I had painted there ran me $300, for a nice single stage job. I just cant stress enough about masking. Not everything, just 1 line of tape around anything that butts up with where they will spray. Im bringing 2 more cars there in the next few weeks.
I've sprayed the $7/quart John deere satin black using an airless spray gun out in the yard,the agricultural enamel takes a while to dry though.
I'd say try the garage too. Some guys wet down the walls and floor before painting. I have put plastic film on the walls, ceiling, and floor in a really old garage. A big roll costs about forty bucks at home depot and cleaning up takes no time at all. Painting outside? Cleaning the overspray off the neighbor's car really sucked!
i've shot primer and blitz outside many times , but you have to do it with NO wind. with you living in michagan outside air temp has to considered too , when it's cold it won't flow or setup properly between coats..or dry at all. paint with a hardener in it usually has to be kept at 70 degrees for it to kick....just my 2 cents...i'm not a painting expert
I have a few ideas Ive used myself in the past. 1. Rent a tent from a local rental joint. I worked at a tent rental place so it was free for me. I put clear plastic around the sides and a fan at each end with a furnace filter. Instant spray booth. It worked so well I debated buying a used tent for painting only. 2. Paint-n-bake or Earl Scwieb. I do all the body work, mask the important areas myself and let them flog it. If you stick to "normal" colors the paint jobs are reasonable. Plus its actual automotive paint baked on. 3. The way you where going to do it. Definety the cheapest and easiest. But hey if it was cheap and easy everybody would be doing it. It will probably look good at 20-30 feet but sometimes thats all ya need.
I used to paint in my garage, but I used lacquer & I could fix stuff easily. Now I wouldn't waste my time & money on high $ paint without a good booth. Blow out your garage several days before you paint, walls, ceiling, everything in it that you would not want to get wet. Wet down the floor and everything else in the garage a few hours before you paint and MAKE SURE you have good ventilation, crack the front door, put a fan surrounded by cardboard to fill a side door. Be very careful if you use a fan, I used an old HVAC squirrel cage fan for years with no problem BUT a fan can cause vapors to explode and hurt you. If you paint in the driveway don't do it unless it is a still day, no wind at all, wet down your work area, try to do it when no neighbors are home so you won't have to pay for getting overspray removed from their cars or their kids. Also pull the masking tape off as soon as the paint is dry, don't leave it in the sun. Use a good tape, cheap tape will cause you problems & lotsa extra work. Wear a good respirator, long sleeved shirt and a cap or something on your head, rubber gloves, etc. Paint & solvents seemed harmless to me when I was younger, as did lifting V8 engine blocks by myself, etc, but I am paying the price healthwise for a lot of dumb shit I did in my younger days, so be careful. Good luck!
Lots of good info above. Painting in the drive can come out just fine, use a single stage, follow the directions. Wait between coats and push it into the garage to dry. Sand that sucker into submission. You'll be surprised how good it can look.
All the posts have great info and good ideas to follow! BELLM's note to use GOOD quality tape is a VERY important one!!! You would not believe how much a difference in job quality a good automotive masking tape can make. Don't cheap out on the tape...seriously. It WILL give you grief from start to finish.
Hang sheets, wet them down. standing water on the floor. Check into local vo-tech schools, ours had a kick ass booth.
My .02, having painted in both the driveway and the dusty garage, hell even a welding shop The best results were using the big roll of plastic. The shops I used had a high ceiling; wrap the walls, then cover the floor in the plastic. The best for clean-up! I agree with all above, no paint booth = no expensive paint! Good luck, remember your PPE. CDNflatlander.
No Hvlp means hi volume low pressure .You need pressure to get the paint on the panel .Hvlp puts out 10 psi at the cap where conventional guns put out 35 -55 psi or as high as you want.With hvlp you will have to be about 4 inches away and it better NOT BE WINDY,I wouldnt do it.
The "V" for volume means lots of cubic feet of air, as in a good sized compressor. Winter time is not good for painting outside in Michigan. In the spring and summer-early in the morning (as the sun comes up) the wind is usually calm, the humidity high, and the bugs are still sleeping. Check the tech section for the post TomH and I did on "Shooting a Track T" Garage painting 101. overspray
Yep, another vote for the Garage. I've painted outside before and the most useful tool for doing this is a pair of tweezers to pick out the bugs/dust etc. Flat paint is a little more forgiving but still dosen't come out as nice as it could in a controlled enviroment. If the garage is really out of the question...at least make sure.. 1, it's not windy. 2, you hose down the driveway. 3, Your compressor has a drier. 4, Spray at dusk or dawn so that the temperature is a little cooler and the sun isn't beating down on the car. A cloudy day will give you more consistant lighting and temperature. You can always lay down a good base coat outside and go back and wet sand any problem spots. the car below was painted Outside. Looks great from far away but has plenty of dust and bugs in the paint.
Painted, flamed, and cleared under a huge oak tree in my front yard with a $15 harbor freight gun, it goes to show what good base clear does fro a paint job. Oh yea....and its more sanding than you will ever want to do!
the dude over at bigblockdart had a tech article on how to create a 100 dollar paint booth for your driveway that minimizes damage to other people's properties (houses, cars, etc) and to your own and aids in cleanup. http://www.bigblockdart.com/resto/repaint/repaint.shtml
First time I ever tried to paint a car I did it in my garage on an UGGGGLY stormy windy day. I would've picked a better day but the garage was attached to the house and the wife was away for the weekend... get the picture. Went down to home depot and bought cheap plastic drop cloths to cover every wall AND the floor. I left the garage door open for ventilation. I used a standard 110v Sears compressor with a old spray gun (very heavy) that my brother found at a garage sale. Shot some PPG single stage and the results were pretty damn good. Can't say it was professional quality job... but most people didn't believe it was shot in a garage. I guess it all depends on what type of results you're expecting and if the satisfaction of doing it yourself is important to you? In my case the results were better than I had anticipated AND the fact that I had done it myself was priceless.
I helped my buddy paint his 72 El Camino in his driveway about 16 years ago. It was springtime with no wind. We used a hose and kept water on the driveway to keep dust down and wash off overspray (his Mom wasn't to happy). Everyting was going great until the cops showed up and tolds us that it was illegal to paint a car outside in the city limits due to VOC laws (gotta love California). They tolds us we could finish but never to do it again. Paint came out good, we did have to buff it more than if we had made a booth.
Back in the days of lacquer, my ex brother in law driveway painted his '61 Pontiac Ventura, and after beaucoup wet sanding, it looked great. He had the experience and know how, just no place to do it in at the time. I know that the modern paints are much more workable after the fact than Dulux and Centari were in the '70s and '80s, so with enough slave labor, an outside job should be possible, weather (and neighbors) permitting.
I guess I will try to clean out the garage and hang up plastic. Doing it outside wouldn't bother anybody either, all my neigbors make meth, so they don't have much room to complain.
If your going that route look for painters plastic at H.D. or Lowes. Real thin but you could cover a house for a few bucks.
I had no gloves and life was hard. Then I met a man with no hands, but he had a one car garage,,what a lucky man. Or something like that.
I paid a guy $100 for this quickie paint job on my '40 Buick - The paint is True Value Rust-X enamel. There isn't even any primer, it's solely to seal the body up - the original paint was gone. This stuff is pretty tough, I've seen some others they painted with it and it will do the job it's supposed to for a few years anyhow. It was painted in a typical dirty garage in mid-November when we had some warm days. The paint looks fine - if I'd had him put a few coats of surfacer on there to fill some of the pits, you'd have a hard time telling it was done quick and dirty. The other, obvious giveaway is he didn't mask off every little bit (the vent by the hood for example) or cover the busted windows super well - but it's no different than I would have done had I the equipment, etc. to do it myself. To top it off, even though it's a gloss paint it came out more of a satin finish, probably because the body is a little rough under it.
Another vote for the garage. Every paint job I ever did was in my 14 X 18 garage. I started by taking my water hose and hosed down everything, hung pegtail lights around the sides, used a can of bug spray, and let it set for about an hour. Pulled the car in, put an exhaust fan in one window and a furnace filter in the other, and started spraying. Tried to paint on cool days or in late afternoon. Did about 20 cars this way. Worked great.
I built a "Booth" out of clear plastic in the back yard, and painted my Lyndwood frame base coat/clear coat, on gravel that I hosed down befor the paint started. Came out super, I have no doubts that it will point judge as good or better than any pro booth painted chassis in a restored race car competition.
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