As you can see from the index picture below, I’ve cracked on and got the rear bodywork done. In fairness it looks a whole lot better than it did before I started but to be honest I right royally screwed up spraying the lacquer coat. 1 coat lacquer is a bit tricky to get right and lets just say this time I didn’t get it right. in fact I got it wrong.. very wrong indeed.
Basically I applied it much too heavily. I got over confident and didn’t dust it on first. As a result I’ve got quite a few runs and sags…. Nothing that wont rub away with a little (lot) 1200 grit wet n dry, once its gone properly hard. But I take pride in trying to get things right. and here I got it very wrong, undoing in the process a good deal of the work of the last few evenings 
Here you can see the worst of it, the lacquer has run off the vertical surface to the right and pooled on the rear body work… worse of all the heavy concentration of solvent attacks the paint and primer below and you can just see the paint cracking. The moulding is complex with lots of right angle surfaces so it is very difficult to spray, and this face was in shadow so I had difficulty judging how much lacquer I’d put on…. answer: too damn much. ARSE!
Duncan will insist “Hey its a race car” (oddly usually in a Jewish accent) and I’m sure it passes the race car test … looking good at 70mph 70 feet away… But I know I screwed it up. ARSE!
But given that this bodywork once looked like this after the fire at Cadwell Park in 2004 I guess I can live with a bit of poor paint lacquer
Still against this background it was very nice to read the complementary comments from you anonymous folks on the front bodywork that I did last weekend… thanks for that, just what I needed
A couple of people have emailed me recently to ask what sort of fancy system I use for painting, well the answer is actually “I don’t.”
It’s simply a compressor, a Sealy spray gun, and paint.
I’ve got a decent size compressor (best tool I ever bought) and a 70 quid gravity fed HVLP spray gun from my local motor paint factor. The compressor is a fantastic bit of kit (its one of these http://www.machinemart.co.uk/shop/product/details/quiet-run-air-compressor/path/ultra-quiet-air-compressors) and I paid £350 for it in a managers sale) its brilliant, runs quieter than a fridge (so much so I tend to forget and leave it on) and runs my vast array of air tools.
Worth every penny, in fact would have been worth every penny if I had paid full price.
But you could do just as good a job with an £80 quid unit from Aldi… it will just be a whole lot noisier and would need a water separator
I used standard upol body filler and rubbed it down to a decent finish using 150 then 300 grit wet n dry, then I use upol TopStop to fill the pores in the thicker filler. Up close you can see some of the heavier scratches from the 150 that I missed when going over it with the finer stuff. Next time I’ll finish with 600.
Then I wipe down with panel wipe and clear the dust with tack rags (again both available from your local paint supplier)
Then I sprayed a couple of layers of standard cellulose based high build filler primer…. I’m learning that you can spray this really thick and provided it hardens properly it will cover a fair few sins. I flatted this off with 600 grit used wet, wipe down and de dust again
Then a few layers of polyester base coat… this you don’t flat off ( or even touch it) so avoiding runs and sags is paramount… hence start with a dust coat to give the surface some grip, and then a couple of heavier coats to get a nice finish and even coverage. If it does run… flat it back and respray the colour again
Then 1 pack clear coat lacquer on top.
The key here is that none of this system uses “2K” or two pack paint. That stuff uses a iso-cyanate (read superglue+cyanide) based catalyst and I don’t fancy poisoning myself or the neighbors. You really need an air fed mask positive pressure mask and full body coveralls to spray that stuff, its pretty nasty (its even absorbed through your tear ducts and skin) . As spraying is fairly heavy on air use the air fed mask would need a separate oil free compressor, a separate air line and it needs to be outside the spraying area so that it doesn’t feed you compressed poison from the fume laden atmosphere. Too much faff, too much by half.
Although some pros say you can spray two pack occasionally with just a good quality vapor mask I’m not taking the risk. And I’m particularly conscious of my neighbors. If you’re spraying in a barn in the middle of Salisbury Plain I guess you could be less precious, but I’m taking no chances.
So using only 1 pack materials, means I can spray in my garage using just a decent 3m vapour mask , and wearing noting more restrictive than my normal oily jeans.
I tend to paint the panels separately as my car only just fits in my garage, and I need working room around them.
So nothing special, but there is probably 5-10 hours worth of prep before you get to good bit of chucking colour around.