Spray painting a car can be a big task, but if done correctly, you will see a huge improvement to your car's look. Not to mention the fact that you can save a lot of money by spray painting your car yourself, instead of hiring a costly professional to paint it for you.The only problem is that most people don't know how to paint a car. Fortunately, this is where I can help you.
In just seven easy steps, I will teach you exactly how to spray paint a car.
1) The first thing you will need to do is figure out what color you want to paint your car. This is probably the easiest step, but it is still very important. If possible, I recommend that you try to pick a color that is similar to the color your car already is. This will greatly reduce the number of coats of paint you will need to put on.
2) Borrow an HVLP gun, compressor, and a painting mask. If you can't find anyone that will lend you these tools, you can certainly go buy them, but by borrowing them you can save yourself a couple hundred dollars.
3) Go buy single stage urethane paint, clear coat, paint reducer, and a paint activator. This is going to cost you a decent amount of money ($50-$100), but it's still much cheaper than having a professional paint shop work on your car.
4) Make sure that your car is in an appropriate location to begin painting. If you live in area where it doesn't rain very much, then I recommend you use your driveway.
5) Tape off/remove all the parts of your car that you do not want painted (headlights, rims, etc.)
6) At last, it's finally time to begin spray painting! I recommend that you do three to five coats of paint. Urethane paint dries very quickly, so you should be able to get all of the painting done in under two hours.
7) After the paint is done drying, apply a few layers of clear coat.
If you followed the steps above, then you have successfully spray painted your car!
You'll note that there was no step to sand your car before beginning to spray paint. This is one of the incredible bonuses to using urethane paint, because unlike other types of car paint, you don't need to do any pre-sanding.
However, that being said, you should still get out any dents or scratches that your car may have before you start to paint. Depending on how beat up your car is, this may or may not be a big task.
