Michael,
Sounds like you are about to do some fun stuff! From a first timers point of view, I would do it this way:
1)Sand hood to bare metal(that way the primer has a solid base to grip to)
2)Follow up cleaning the bare metal with a paper towel and some PPG Cleaner, when dry, follow through with a tack rag to get rid of any paper towel particles,etc.
3) Shoot some high build primer overlapping every half way to get good coverage. Let dry, block/wet sand with 400-600 grit. Darker spots will be low spots, bare metal-high. Shoot another coat of primer, sand with 800-1000 grit. Get a block to sand, using your hand will leave striations because of uneven fingers, unless you want to let your car look like it has tiger stripes under the paint.
4)Clean and prep
5)Mist the first coat of paint about 1 1/2 ft high from the panel.(adjust gun if shooting too heavy)
6) Follow up with a heavier coat until full coverage. let cure and dry(different paints have different cure times).
7) once dry, wet sand with 1000 grit to get rid of imperfections(bugs, dog hair, your hair, etc)
8)Follow up with shooting clear. Same concept from above, mist, and every coat get heavier. Main thing, move your arm as you are layering or you WILL get runs.
9) When I did my car, I shot 3 coats of clear, wet sanding in between each coat. Doing so gave the finish more depth(maybe an aesthetic thing, but it certainly looks that way to me).
10) Once fully cured and dry. Wet sand one final time with 1000-1200 grit. At this stage, once the wet sanding is done and all the milky white clear residue is cleaned off, you should be able to see a pretty sheen and gloss on the panel.
11) Bring out the buffer, 3M Rubbing compound (Yellow Bottle), follow up with Polishing compound(Black or Purple bottle)
12)Done
Now this is just one of hundreds of ways to do it and others may have different opinions towards my approach, but it worked for me.
I used:
PPG Self-etching primer
PPG High Build Primer
Urekem Jalapeno R
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Mach173 wrote:
