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How to Do Custom Paint on Your Car

I have talked a lot about auto paint in the past, but never much about how to do custom paint work on your car, so in this article I will delve in to the most basic aspects of custom paint work on your car, for this article we’ll assume that you have already prepped your car for paint.

I have already done so many articles paint prep I don’t see the use to do any more, now that we have that out of the way, we’ll discuss one of the most important parts of the custom paint job on your car, and that is the cleaning of the surface, this must be done right, and perfect.

Before we get to the most important parts of the precess, we’ll talk about the cleaning of the surface of the car’s body surface, this is done with surface prep cleaner, which you can get from your local paint supply house, and tack clothing.

In a perfect world we’d have it all perfect with out a huge amount of time being spent on it, but since this is not a perfect world, we must take the time to do this the right way, as I tell you with everything, please do not be in a hurry, this is a very important parts of the game.

After you have done the prep cleaning, and you have tack clothed the entire car using clear coat safe tack clothes, you can move on to the next stage of the process, that would be the masking, I realize that you have already masked the car for the paint, or primer work that has already been done.

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The masking need to be re-done again for your custom paint work, most custom paint work doesn’t start on the primed surface of the car, it usually starts on the base coat of a freshly painted car, I thought I’d better mention that, since I don’t remember the last time I custom painted on primer.

I usually wait about thirty minutes before I mask to the base coat of the car, keep in mind that depending on what the painter prefers he may also use an inter coat clear coat, this is a special clear coat designed to lay custom paint over, and is a good idea yo use in my opinion.

But for this article we’ll spray the custom graphics right on the base coat for the sake of ease of explanation, now that you have the surface of the paint all clean, and tacked off you can begin to do your masking, and this is not a fast process for custom paint work.

Depending on the graphics that your spraying, it may take a lot of re-masking to cover the graphics that you have already done, so you can spray your next color, or graphic, for this article we’ll just spray some simple flames on the car.

The very first thing is to be sure that you have already laid out your flames on some masking paper, you need to know exactly how you want them to look, on the car it’s self we’ll use 1/8 inch vinyl tape to lay out the flames, the vinyl tape is very flexible, this is what we use it.

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After you lay out your flames you’ll need to mask the rest of the car, so only the area where the flames are is showing, the idea here to not to pile a lot of paint on this area, you don’t want to build a huge edge for the clear to cover, this can cause problems you don’t want.

What you need to do here is get the main color for your flames laid on the car, then we’ll use an air brush to do the details of the flame work, you don’t have to use an air brush, you can just mask the area that you just painted, and leave the detail area un-masked to paint it.

It does take a lot longer this way though, and the chances of building a paint edge get much greater if you use a normal spray gun to do the detail work, so for this article we’ll use an air brush, now that we have our base color laid out, something like a light orange.

We can begin adding in all of the other colors that a flame has, the build special stencils to lay the main curves, and suttle shadows that a flame has, you may want to practice with these stencils before you use them, it’s not a simple process.

You should not have to use more then four, or five colors in your flame work, unless it’s a really custom flame job, obviously the more colors that you use, the longer is will take to get the process completed, the idea here is to get what you want though, so the extra time should not bother you.

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Once you have gotten all of the colors laid out to your satisfaction, you should give your paint work about 1/2 hour of dry time, then you’ll need to come in and tack cloth your work one more time, and un-mask the car, and get the entire surface of the car cleaned again.

After you have cleaned the surface with a tack cloth again, you’re ready to put the clear coat to the car. I’d suggest that you use a high build clear, and put at least four coats on it on, a build clear will build 1.5 coats for every coat that you spray.

As with any other paint work you should always wait 20 minutes between coats of clear for flash time , or you will put runs in your paint work, if you give it the flash time, you paint work should look great in the end, make sure that you give it 24 hours of dry time before you touch it.

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