Wonder Wall: DIY Automobile Spray Painting

Spray painting my R15

Spray painting is not so easy as i thought it would be. I guess you just get better doing it with experience. The first time i tried it was when i tried spray painting my bike from Red to Blue as the red was fading away and I wanted to restore the aesthetic nature of my bike.

Anyways, I ended up spoiling it as i did a quite miserable job which is not quite visible in the picture.

Here is the old one

And this is how i made it to look like.

Anyway, this blog is about how to make your paint job look better. Since i have a lot of free time now, i figured i ll redo the paint job of my bike. This time i am going to change it to Light Grey.

For any paint job to come out well the first thing you should be doing is SANDING. You have to have a lot of patience sanding away all the irregularities on the areas where you wish to paint.

Another most important thing is - WET SANDING. Always Wet sand - meaning use water - lots of it and then scrub with the sand paper and then run your finger or palm over the area where you sanded and make sure you feel your palm or finger just slides off the area without any little pricky substances.

I will give you another valuable information.. Use 3M 600 grit sand paper from England. It cost 30 rupees for a sheet and (you get it in the shops that sell automotive paint) while all other sand papers would cost you around 5 to 10 rupees. The problem with the cheaper sand papers is, they wither and tear apart while you wet sand and it does not last long while the single 3M sheet lasts for the whole bike.

So i began disassembling the parts of my bike and then started the tedious process of wet sanding. Believe it or not. It took me a day and a half to wet sand all the parts.

Here are some photos since you might get bored of reading.

Day 1 of Wet sanding.

Use scotch brite to wash the areas with water and the remains of paint tries to stick to the body.

Day 2 of wet sanding as it still dint look great after it dried.
Now mask all the emblems and important regions where you dont want paint to stay on using a Masking tape. Cost 30 per roll.

First round of Primer coat to bind the surface of the fenders. Its even called a PS primer. Polyurathene Surfacer primer. Just spray a single coat to utmost two coats. Make sure you lay the primer paint down. The primer dries off quite quickly in abound 5 to 10 minutes.

How do you use a spray gun? well this is a very vast topic, you should now head over to youtube and check videos of people guiding you to use a spray gun. Always control the air flow and the fluid flow knobs and set it to the right setting before you spray. The pressure of the compressor should be 40 psi to 55 psi.

Always make sure the paint is mixed with a thinner and it should just drip quickly and not too slowly. make sure you dont over thin the paint.

After i have a good layer of primer on the body of the bike, I will now spray Light grey automotive paint over it. The paint you see in the picture is a mat finish paint i.e. It wont shine. For it to shine, we will have to spray a clear coat paint.

This is after 2 coats of paint. Continuing to spray 2 more coats and then make my own graphics over the side fenders.

Wet Sand again to make the body smooth.

For the graphics, always design it before hand on your computer and make sure you might like the outcome of your design.

I randomly took the blue bike picture and made some changes on Aviary (android photo editor App)

I like the first more that the second, so going with the first design. It has three shades. Dark Grey, Bright Red and Black.

Continuing with the paint job. After two more coats of Prime and wet sanding, Mask the desired area on the fender panels to paint red.

Spraying Red automotive paint. in the desired areas. After you are done spraying. Immediately peel off the masking tapes. The more you delay peeling it off the more are the chances that the paint on the panels might come off from it when you pull out the tapes.

Wet sand the red painted areas with 1000 grit sand paper carefully without any pressure.
Now after its dry, Mask the red areas in order to spray Dark Grey to the rest of the parts.

If you get this, Its called an orange peel. Use 1000 grit sand paper and wet sand till it smoothens out.