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Homemade Paint Shop - 4/9/05

Well, after getting a couple of quotes for $3,500 to paint Sparky, I decided to paint it myself.  It doesn't make sense to pay more for a paint job then the bus cost in the first place.  Maybe for a 23 window, but not a '71 bay window Westy that is going to get scratched on the first campout.

Once the decision was made to paint Sparky myself, I started researching what I needed to do to my garage.

  1. Clean, clean, clean - I removed everything except the cabinets

  2. First, I swept up all the dead bugs and about 2 pounds of bondo dust.

  3. Next, I used an air blower and blew the walls, ceiling, top of the lights, top of the cabinets, etc. to get all the loose dust.

  4. Sweep again, then washed the floor

  5. Lights - I went to Lowe's and bought four new 4 ft. shop lights.

  6. I replaced two existing lights and installed the other two on the opposite side for a total of 5 - 4ft. shop lights and 2 - 2 ft. shop lights.

  7. Next was getting some air flow through the garage.  Luckily for me, I have a 5,000 BTU window in the back wall of my garage.

  8. I bought a package of 20" x 20" furnace filters and a 20" box fan at Lowe's 

  9. I installed two of the furnace filters in 2 broken down cardboard boxes

  10. I removed the window unit and wire tied the box fan over the opening on the outside

 

PRIMETIME

Now that the shop is ready, it's time to lay on 3 coats of high build primer.  I used OMNI 2 part primer.  I tried spraying this primer once before with my small touch-up gun with no luck.  So, I bought a two gun HVLP set from my local paint shop.  They are cheap ones so we will see how good of job they do.  The primer nozzle is a 1.7mm.

It took 2 hours, but Sparky is 100% covered in high build primer.  I had to clean the gun three times while shooting to keep the primer flowing.

As you can see, the top two were from Thursday night before I taped off the windows.  Check out all that new light!  The bottom two are from Saturday morning. 

Now it's time to block sand for about a week.  Next episode - paint.

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