Its actually not too hard to do. Get yourself a place you can turn into a booth, We used a wooden garage and put up sheets all around it. Swept out the floor and then soaked it. The cars were all sanded down using 400-320 grit. Mixed up the primer (grey) with the thinners etc, applied it in even light coats, 2 primer I think, 2 paint and a sparkle coat, then 2 clear. Something like that. We painted a couple cars over a few days and the results were actually not bad haha, We were surprised. Im sure others will say thats not how to do it, but meh.. its what we did and it was cheap as chips. This was painted by our friend, Whos almost a time served painter: These were painted by a Russian who youtubed it the night before..
The primer is watered down using thinners to basically make it easier to apply. Thats my understanding of it, to not clog up the gun. The sanding was just rough cut, Literally 400 grit it, go over with some 320 so its all keyed, nothing special at all was required, this was the same requirement for the painter dude when he did my car the first time, and jites etc.
Wasnt alot really as we had left over paint and we got thinners for cheap and primer for free lol. So its hard to work that out, but basically.. You could say the price of paint, thinners, primer and the masks/tape etc to mask it off. £200 tops? Out of 3 tubs of paint, we painted my car twice, an mx5, an altezza and a s14. Im just trying to get answers as It was Pete who did all the work, but hes on a flight to Russia atm :S Will report back when he gets back to me.
Hmm, Dunno cant imagine it being as hard as matching purple/pink metallic sparkles lol. Edit - Pete said, he used thinners in everything. 10-20% depending how he wanted the spray to go. He said the primer is pretty thick, so needed thinned down to go through the gun.
The thing with getting a good finish is excessively ocd prep followed by a nice dust free environment, use tac cloths to clean up the paint before spraying. dont rush the gun and only hold the spray while the gun is parallel to the metal work, dont rotate it at the start/finish of the stroke with the spray going, you will get an uneven finish. lay the paint on in multiple thin coats to avoid runs and used the correct grades of paper to prep at each stage, Dont skimp on the prep work! if you take your time and prep it correct and use a dust free environment it will be pretty perfect. leave the paint for a while (ask the paint supplier how long you'd need too) then use a buffer lightly to bring up the finish if its not as great as you'd like. thats how i have always done it. I always put a space heater in the garage when i do it to help dry the paint. i use a big roll of plastic sheet on the garage roof/walls and a light soak of water on the floor to keep the dust from picking up as you spray, i also rig up a double car fan on my back window so that it extracts fumes and cover up anything you dont want covered in paint! overspray gets everywhere. when you do it, i would take off all the panels including doors and spray each part separate, then if you fuck up you only have one panel to re prep. * you can get a ruler that tells you how much of paint/thinners/hardner you need, I like to use 2k its easier than waterbased.
just to add to fifi, some primers are 1k so dont need hardener. So filler primers are really thick. I'v used a few that needed at least 1:1 with thinners just to get a wet finish out the gun. If its to thick it tends to come out dry and you will get a finish like sandpaper.
One thing ive learnt is making panel wipe aka wax n grease remover your best mate. So many times ive thought oh its clean good to go! ...and then it reacts with whatever invisible crap thats on the panel. rage...so much rage
Like i said excessively OCD Prep work lol, in reality the spraying is the easy bit and takes barely any time at all but good prep work takes ages and a good eye/feel for the paint. When my dad taught me to spray id think it was perfect but his experienced eye would spot imperfections from a mile away! the thing with the prep is if you think you have got it perfect look over it again from every possible angle you will realise just how far away you are.