I had a busy few months last year going from this:[frame]
To this:[frame]
Obviously, most of the time was spent removing the cat from the roof, but beyond that lots and lots of rubbing down.
The original intention was to take the car to my mate's garage for a respray, but it ended up with the panels being removed and these taken there for prepping and paint. The garage seemed quite large until we started to turn it in to a spray shop, then all of a sudden there seemed to be bits of car everywhere and little room to work. My son, who's been in the motor trade for over 20 years, helped with the prep work but insisted I do the spraying 'as it was my car'. It was my first attempt beyond using rattle cans, and I was using an Apollo Spraymate. Like with all new tools, it felt a bit awkward in my hand to start with, but I soon got the feel of it. We used white high-build primer followed by Olde English white top coats. I have to say I was very impressed with the Apollo; good price and good results. The critical bit seemed to be getting the paint/thinners mix right so the paint flowed out.
Back at base, decided to take a chance and spray the rest of the body outside. Actually put the primer on with a mini roller and this worked very well. Having found that I'd used more paint than expected, had to buy some more and of course the match wasn't quite perfect. Good enough for me though as I'm more interested in driving the car than showing it. This lot of paint went on pretty well, and in fact just as I was getting near the end of the job, I was getting a good shine straight from the gun. I will be attacking it all with 1200 wet n dry and Farecla G3 though - in fact tried a panel last week and got a mirror finish!
The bumper valances are in primer and will get their top coats asap. I had to replace the front panel as the old one was distorted, and I had to smack the offside bumper tube forward an inch or so to get it in line. So looks like the beastie had had a bit of a shunt.
I've been tidying up the interior as well, which included painting the front seat frames with black Smoothrite. I found that if I'd missed a bit, a cotton bud made a good, disposable 'paint brush', with no need to get the thinners out for cleaning.
I can't wait for the weather to pick up so I can crack on, and I'll hopefully put up some pics of the finished article.