Welcome friend. In this video we'll be painting this van with a water-based
base coat and a 2k clear coat lacquer. I'll be doing this in the Flowering Elbow
workshop which temporarily got converted to a spray booth, I'm really pleased with
the results of this project and I'll show you step by step what I did
including the mistakes I made.
[Intro Music]
So what I'm doing now is using some of this panel wipe down de-greaser to get rid of any spots of tar,
or grease, on the body work, before I do the orbital sanding.
So for this exciting job I'm using a standard
panel white that's a wax and grease remover
solvent. And if there's any help I'll try and leave links to all the materials I
use down in the description below. It doesn't have to be a super thorough job
because we're hitting it with the random orbit but getting the tar off first
really helps save the sanding sheets and stops them getting clogged up which in
turn hopefully prevents the sticky stuff from being spread all over the bodywork.
Now our vans had an interesting and varied history and it's been resprayed
in its lifetime, after a serious accident. This was before we owned it. The respray
job didn't include the roof and so we don't need to respray that. But the rest
of it it either had very little lacquer on it or some kind of very cheap non UV
resistant lacquer. But either way you can tell as we sanded, it just came straight
to blue so the clear coat's all worn off. Which is why it looks so patchy in
places as the UV has discolored the base coat. In contrast the sanding dust on the
sliding door is white, which indicates with sanding clear coat rather than just
base coat.
So we've got some interesting bits of filler, that we have found here,
here, all along here. [SIGH!] I don't know...
Let's plow on regardless and think about creating a place we can
actually do this. The problem with doing outside is that your then at the whim of
the weather the birds, the insects, all that kind of thing. Even
dust can be a problem outside, we think of it as clean but there's actually -
especially if it's windy - quite a bit of dust in the air. As you've no doubt
deduced I'm gonna try and "spray boothify" the workshop here. I tried to design things
as I've been building up the workshop, bit by bit, to be as flexible and mobile
as possible, so most of the machines do have wheels on and I can move them
across. The workshop itself is approximately equivalent to a two bay
garage size type thing even though it's very unconventional has straw bale walls
and all the rest of it. We're going to want to create a through flow of air
that's filtered so it's not dusty - more on that later.
For now we're using some cardboard to protect the floor so hopefully it
doesn't turn completely blue. Cleanliness is super important so anything you bring
in has to be cleaned well and it's worth checking your shop vac is filtering to a
fine enough level.
So I have wiped the area down, now I'm just going to shake this up and give it
a coat of primer. Just to sort of seal that area and smooth it down.
The original wing panel on the fan had such serious rust
that the repairs I did meant it was mainly fibreglass by the end. This new
panel from ebay was cheap enough and it came primed and ready to paint. It picked
up to scratches somewhere along the line though and I wanted to sort those out
before starting. We can basically treat this and the bonnet you can see there as
test panels for the whole process. Turn to the spray booth issue briefly: air is
being blown out through that big door and it comes in through this one. We want
to filter the incoming air. So we've got a very clean sheet. With both doors open the workshop
becomes something of a wind tunnel. We often use that to our advantage with
super dusty fumy jobs. Ok i'm going to call that good.
It probably shouldn't have been, but this was all a bit of an afterthought.
Umm, the filling of the gun itself! So I've just made this mount here. There's a funnel with an old
tea bag, well a new tea bag (removed of the tea!) just to be a
strainer/ filter thing there and I've got the gun here held and that's just
elastic banded in this kind of weird way and then it pops out of this little
gap thing here. This is very exciting I've spent a long time prepping for this!
We've got our (spray) gun setup ready, we've got compressed air piped in - that
should be conditioned and oil free, we've got our paints ready to mix, we've got the fans blowing the
air through, we've got nice cleanliness, we've got our masking down,
There was something else, but I can't remember... Enough chit-chat, lets give it a try!
This bit of wing actually seems to have dried quite nicely.
As this is just something of a test piece I wasn't sure if I was gonna put this in
the video so I haven't got footage of the actual spray of this. But here I'm
using the tack cloth, this is after the first coat.
[Laughs] OK wet patch there!
I made two blunders on this
same panel: there's one there and you can just about to see another one at the
front of that wing. The bonnet went okay, the underside of the bonnet and I'm just
waiting for that to flash off and then I'm just spraying on a second coat and
kind of crossing my fingers and hoping that's gonna cover up that little
blemish. What he saw happening there was me holding the gun at too steep an angle
and the paint just sort of ran out and wouldn't travel through. So I had to
spray it on that little scrap down the bottom.
As far as I can tell it's quite
unusual for DIYers to use water-based paint for the base coat. I really wanted
to because it's so much better environmentally. It has some other unique features as
well and here's one: It looks mega orange peely at this stage. With the first coat
that just sort of fell away so I'm hoping the same will happen. As a novice
to this whole process when it went on fresh it was worrying to see how it
looked but when it dries it just looks really good!
I've heard accounts from a few other people saying just the same thing
so I think that's probably quite universal for water-based paint.
To recap so far then, although I screwed up the wing by tack clothing
too soon I was actually quite encouraged by how the underside of the bonnet went
so here I am preparing some more paint. I'm just mixing in a touch of water to
dilute it - which is a cool thing about water based paints - this gives it a
consistency that will just about go through the tea bag strainer thing I'm
using and seems to go through the gun well. Now if A you've got experience
with water-based paints and B you're a professional a spray painter and C you
haven't destroyed your computer in frustration yet, you could leave us a
comment below saying what I should be doing to mix up these paints well and
I'm sure that be useful for our DIY watchers here as well. Okay let's move
on to the next big lesson I learnt or big mistake I made which is a nice
compound mistake which started with ill preparing the top of this bonnet.
Water-based paints are notoriously fussy and really require a completely clean
starting surface. Part one of this mistake was not getting that completely
grease free surface by not using enough solvents to wipe down the panel. There's
various fish eyes and other blemishes, I think caused by that, and what I should
have done was just started again but instead I tried to crack them the
sandpaper and overcoat. Turned out this was just a waste of paint and time! Some
of those blemishes were still there after the second coat had dried and
trying to fix them with the random orbit sander actually just led to the paint kind
of peeling off completely. This is with, I think, 700 grit paper and it's leaving
behind the primer slightly roughened up which should be a nice surface to paint
on. If we say part two of this mistake was ploughing on and doing that extra
coat, part three of the mistake was that I didn't actually do a proper first coat!
The first coat is supposed to be 0.5 of a coat. I expect and hope some of you are
going to tell me the various wrongs or rights of that but as I understand it
this is a very thin coat, that's kind of sprayed from a bit further away than a
normal one. A sort of dusting that just provides the water-based paint
with a good foundation for the next coat that goes on a lot more thickly. As you
saw before during that I had to put on some more primer paint because in some places when
I was sanding I went down to bare metal. I know I can basically hear lots of you
slapping your own foreheads here and rolling your eyes. it's quite time-consuming
because each time you do that you have to wait for that to dry. Looking at the
video I think I probably overdid it slightly on the bottom right corner of
that bonnet for the 0.5 coat but apart from that I'd call that first half
coat done! Because it's a half coat that flashes a little bit quicker than normal
it's taking about 40 minutes here and that's at 22 degrees C in the workshop.
Now we're on to putting the first full coat on and you can see how much closer
I'm doing that and how much more full-bodied a coat it is. I think the flash
off time is a really big consideration with water-based paints, where as the
solvent evaporates really quickly even in quite cold conditions. But for
water-based I think it's probably important to have the ambient
temperature at least about 20 degrees C or you're going to be waiting really
long time between coats. The difficulty in making a "spray booth", is
that, in the UK at least, it's hard to get the air flow required and control the
temperature at the same time. In my case I've got air rushing in through that
bed-sheet which means it's slightly filtered but not heated in any way. With
the supplementary fan heaters you've seen, I'm just about pulling this off.
This last of the 2.5 recommended coats of base color paint is going on much
better now after those earlier mistakes. Here's a top tip view I haven't seen
anywhere else: you can use one of these cheap laser thermometers, and it really
clearly indicates which patches are dry and which are still wet. So before you
tack cloth you can have some certainty about that. There's a fairly distinct 2
degrees C difference between drying areas and bits are fully dry.
Now we are mixing up to the 2k clear coat I've just got marked on the jar there
correct proportions. I'm putting about 5% thinners into it just to make it go
through the gun and atomizer really nicely.
This is the last tack clothing thing I'll be giving these panels. You don't tack
cloth between clear coats - more on that later.
As this is the first clear coating
I'll be doing, I spend a little while dialing the gun settings in on that
little scrap. It's a good time to talk about safety now we've moved on from the
water base to the truly brutal 2k clear coat chemicals. The activator our
hardener in them contains isocyanates, which you don't want to be snorting up
or getting on your skin in any way, and they can travel through latex. So a tip
here is to wear nitrite gloves rather than latex ones. You can see the mist
from this goes absolutely everywhere and having any kind of exposed skin is a
terrible idea. As is having your ears or eyes exposed.
Rather than going on about it too much here, I'm gonna leave the details of the
respirator face shield that I use down in the description below - it's been a
game changer for me for loads of workshop tasks especially chainsaw
milling. Judging when the first clear coat is
ready to be over coated is something of an art form. The rule of thumb that's been
working for me is to test it with your gloved thumb and see whether it's sticky.
It's ready to over coat when it feels a bit like the back of a postage stamp
before you lick it. It shouldn't be wet and slippy but neither should it be
completely dry. For me in these conditions it was taking about 10 to 15
minutes between coats. It's worth knowing if you leave it dry too long the next
coat won't adhere properly. Another advantage of the water-based paint is
that you can use just plain water to clean the gun and your tools. In this case
after the clear coating we quickly want to get the solvents in there. Get everything
clean and dried out ready for the next time.
Incidentally I'm using an ANI spray gun with a 1.3 millimeter tip. I don't have
loads of experience with spray guns. I think this one's a sort of mid level kind
of gun but it's worked for me just straight out of the gate really well! I'm
looking forward to seeing how it does on some of my other projects especially
with woodworking finishes. So friend, that work quite well let's see what
happens when we can actually get the van in!
[Music builds]
The primer really highlights these little cracks here
that are some kind of filler.
Obviously I have that drip to sand down anyway.
And there's some more of those cracks around this side too, down
this wing area here...
[Music]
At some points the spray mist got really quite thick. To help filter this somewhat
I turn the dust extractor on, and you can see here how much it's filtering out. It's
just got a HEPA filter bag from a Hoover over the exit,
Just to make sure it's not blasting it through...
[Music]
So, it's the day after... It looks pretty good, there's definitely some...
Bits of... insects, in it.
It's got a bit of orange peel-ness. It's
kind of like how a factory paint is normally, so I'm pretty happy with that!
When you compare the bonnet which was unprepped un-sanded, didn't do much
tack clothing or anything like that but it's also a flat surface so
presumably more dust and stuff would settle on that - that's a lot worse in terms of
gubbins on it than the rest of it. Okay it's time to get this masking tape
off and see what we've got under here. This should be a cool moment. I'm a little bit
worried because I probably should have done the de-masking before the clear coat
had chance to completely set, but we'll see how it goes. The masking tape seems to come away okay. The
only downside is the shiny new paintwork casts the shoddy handles and plastics in
quite sharp relief. But that's okay I'm not really want to be preening over the
looks of the van. This is much more of a work vehicle - so long as it looks
respectable kind of close up and keeps the rust away, I'm happy!
And off it goes! I don't know how I managed that but... it's OK.
If you're interested in
the cost of spraying your own vehicle versus just putting it into a paint shop,
I'll try and leave a list of expenses in the description below. It might be
possible to save money doing this, but not if you factor in your own time.
Personally I really love exploring new skills and was keen to get set up for
spray-painting other projects so I'm really pleased I went ahead and did this.
Well friend, there it is, back to being nice and dirty, as it always it. Hopefully some of that was useful.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. :)
[Seagulls]
[Engine noise]