Prepping for paint...

Ok I plan to get the jeep painted at a quality shop but I want to do the prep myself. It will cut the cost more than in half. I am going to go pick up some books on how to prep for paint and all the good stuff. I wanted to ask some of you body work guys:

Is it really easy to F up?

Do you have any pointers or tips?

Wanna give me a quick guide to prepping?

I plan to get it painted steel blue. It is dark green right now. I am not sure if I want to do all the work for the door jams or not. Maybe I will just coat those with some bed liner. Thanks in advance!

Mike

Prep is the basis for every flaw in the finished product, and the learning curve can be a little steep. Yoru biggest assets are patience and an absolute determination to prevent shortcuts.

Although Jeepers are known to do some some expedient things, painting the jambs with bedliner is intriguing. Yes, the a color change from green to blue will be a noticeable eyesore without addressing it, but will going to black in a rough finish be what you want? How will your light colored clothes - or hers - react when you slide in against it? Sometimes it just works better to keep the same color and reduce the expense and workload.

As for sanding and prep, removing all the trim, wheel arches, and roof rack will be entertaining enough with broken screws and bolts to question why carbon steel Torx are allowed on the face of earth, but you'll be in a position to change that buying new ones.

Sanding is the difficult part, it's either labor intensive or equipment intensive, and power tool supply systems are limited to compressed air or electric - which gets complicated by wet sanding. The best advice I ever heard was to have your fingers professionally removed if hand sanding, because that way you can't possibly groove out paint chips and will do the right thing - sand out the surrounding 12 inches to level them. Using block sanders, tubes, etc, you can do it. Just expect it to take a week - you cannot hurry a good first sanding - if you do, you'll see it in the first color coat and kick yourself.

If you can do well sanding and prepping, you might consider the $50 paint job, as you will be 3/4 there and able to save $hundreds more finishing it yourself.

This may not sound real positive, but I'm discussing this with my spouse and my major obstacle is time working 56 hour weeks, and putting up a new masonry chimney. So trailer park camo is my present choice (peeling clear coat.)

Mike-

What did you learn from your research?

Have you painted yet?

If so, what was the process you used?

Thanks

Read

i painted my old 85 6000 ste about 10 years ago. i did prep and paint. The biggest piece of addvice i can give you about prep. Is one don't take any short cuts. And 2 when you think you done sanding your not. keep sanding. You will be so sick of sanding stuff when you done you won't ever want to see sand paper again.

What XJ6.0 said times 2. When you're sick and tired of sanding and you just can't take any more... take a break and come back the next weekend, and look it all over... You'll discover bunches of defects that you didn't see when you were sick of sanding. Depending on how experienced you are you might even do that a couple times in a row, and even then there will be stuff that you didn't think would show... that will beam through the fresh paint like a a big poster that reads "I did all the sanding myself to save money".

There's a very good reason why sanding adds half the cost. it's 90% of the paint job. Even an award winning painter can't make a "decent" sanding job look professional.

get the eastwood catalog they have a product that you mist on (you have a mister for removing wax before you started sanding right? If you sanded before de-waxing prepair for a SHITTY paint job full of "fisheye") This product will gloss an area up and make defects jump out at you. You'll need it if you're inexperienced. Some guys swear by it... I don't use it, I don't even remember it's name But the specular highlights is creates does make it easyer for even the trained eye to detect flaws. I think it would be a must have for a novice.

Do NOT remove the factory paint except for repaired area's, it is harder than even the best cost efficient auto body paint systems. It is harder, and makes a fine base primer. DO use a "gloss primer" unless you blast down to bare metal, in which case spring for an epoxy primer base.

Do not say "well that's a minor flaw it wont show" it will show and it will annoy the shit out of you that you saw it and didn't fix it. Flaws you didn't see don't sting so much as flaws you knew about.

I have several nickle sized rust spots on the top of my Forest Green roof.

I am torn between just spot sanding and touch up painting or repainting the whole roof white.

Anyone done this on their roof? If I repaint a new color do I have to strip the whole roof or can I just take the spots down to bare metal? Can I then use a filler paint and sand to get level and then start many coats of white?

Use a primer in between?

No, just knock down the shine. Rust down to bare metal. Sealer on the now bare rust spots. Primer. Paint... Something like that