Prepping fort paint

I have an 89 xj limited with some clearcoat peeling in a few placed, I plan on painting it (in my garage with satin black) so nothing professional, can I just rough up all the paint and spray or should I sand the clear off? This is no show truck just gotta get rid of the gross purple/maroon color.

I would hit it with 120 or some thing around there really good and try to get all the old clear coat off.

if you arent lookin for anything fancy, i would take some 220 and sand out the parts that the clear is peeling off...then go back over the whole jeep with 400 or so and spray away.

I'd only worry about sanding the areas that are rough from the peeling celar coat, spray the rest as is. I just redid my entire Jeep using the same satin black. It comes out more flat black then satin, unless you lay it on real thick. My only regret is not sanding my roof smooth first because that's where I had the majority of the peeling going on and now its still there, just black.

I did my DD cherokee a couple months ago. Same issues...


I went to crappy tire some time ago (for the other jeep) and bought one of their cheap RO sanders. They're like $19.99 if you ask the manager what the sale price is - they'll give it to you for that most of the time.


Hit the whole thing with 80 grit after pulling the trim, door handles, roof rack, flares, etc etc. I concentrated on gettign the bad clear off more than anything. Then I hit with 120, then 200... I should have gone too 400~ in retrospect.

Cleaned, fixed slight rust issue, masked and sprayed with my favorite paint (tremclad... $10 for all I needed).

Took me 4 days total.