Bodywork Spot Respray

[DamirGTI 342]

Been doing some repairs on a few individual areas of the bodywork :

 

 

 

 

... so rear quarter panel , A pillar , lower half of the left door .. and need to respray an fit new right door cos the present one was rusted away round the entire bottom area beyond economical repair (have a good spare door which just needs an respray) .

 

The car was resprayed round 10 years ago in 2-pack solid colour , since i don't have equipment (air feed mask mainly ..) nor the facilities to go 2-pack route and i couldn't find any paint shop which still does Acrylic paint mix , i bought 1-pack - cellulose base , for clear over base refinishing system .

 

Now the thing that bothers me , i dunno whether to use just the base coat as it is , without clear coat , and buff/polish it to bring up the shine so that the resprayed areas match the rest of the bodywork or to do it the usual "clear over base" way ?!?

 

As it goes with cherry red , mine is also a bit faded , but with a bit of polishing it brings back the shine pretty good ... however , i'm a bit worried if i do the "clear over base" way round the repair areas that they'll outshine the rest of the bodywork and as such will be kinda visible paint repair with regards to the panel shine differences .

 

Anyone did similar job ? and is there a noticeable difference in paint shine on 2-pack solid colour and "clear over base" painted car ? (me thinks that in comparison the "clear over base" is a bit shiny ..)

 

D

Edited January 12, 2014 by DamirGTI

[Furyblade_Lee 2]

From my limited experience you have to use the clear coat over the base, it wont ever be shiny or shine won't last, not good either way. If it is a perfect colour match then it should not really notice to the untrained eye if both are cut and polished to perfection. However, red is notoriously bad to match anyhow, I once had a red car which I signed off as a good repair in sunlight, but when it was parked under a yellow streetlamp it looked awful! I'd be worried too that your red paint is fading, if it keeps re-fading then there is a problem and you should get a friendly body shop to take a look. It may be better, if your car is a keeper, to get a couple of panels sprayed and blended . The 205 Gti has natural breaks like plastic trim and HUGE panel gaps (!) so maybe getting the whole side resprayed above the plastic trim centre line will be the best option, so no different paints join on door / wing / rear panel.

 

* edited to say I just had a proper look at your pic, and if you are spraying the whole left hand side anyway clear over base will be fine, just check out your fading paint first.

Edited January 21, 2014 by Furyblade_Lee

[GLPoomobile 958]

I'm really disappointed in you Damir You scrapped a door for being too rusty? Shame on you! I think I speak for the whole forum when I say that we expected better of you

 

 

Joking of course

[DamirGTI 342]

I have tried to fix them at first ! :

 

 

.. cut the rot off made an replacement plate out of sheet steel and all was going reasonably well until i "overcooked" one corner with the welder and created quite big dent .. also the thickness of the repair plate was a bit too much for modelling/bending thus i had problems with folding the corners of the repair plate round the door base with hammer & dolly ... didn't like it and plus i had to fill and sand the dent and the repair patch so i decided to scrap the lot .

 

Anyways - paint ..

Tried practising on this the scrap door , base with the clear on top seemed to me a bit too shiny in comparison with the original colour .. thoroughly polished the rest of the door but still the side which i test sprayed "clear over base" kinda out-shined the rest ..

So , i tried just the base without the clear .. that ended up mat finish as expected , but with an blast with 1500 and 2000 wet sanding paper and polishing i got almost identical sheen ..

 

Thus i decided to spray just with the base , without the clear on top , and buff it out afterwards to bring up the shine .. all the areas turned up good , paint match is a bit off after all now by looking at the complete bodywork (as Lee said above - looks like good match during the daylight but at night , under the lights slight difference can be seen ..) .. too late now , will just get it dirty and wont clean it so often !

 

Now the paint sanding/buffing , that didn't go so well - s***t load of octopus hand work all day long to compound the paint , and i even succeeded to burn trough the paint on the body line on the rear quarter panel :

 

 

... did 10 coats of paint , but obviously that still wasn't enough for wet sanding/compounding afterwards .. so , had to repaint again over this area where i burnt trough down to the primer ..

 

I hate this painting/buffing job !! can't wait to grab my sockets/spanners and do some mechanic instead .

 

D