Why you shouldn't wetsand in cold temps

[Garageaholic]

So i try to wetsand my car today after rolling my 5th coat of white paint in my unheated garage, I find that it was so cold today that as I sprayed water on the body to wetsand it, the fucking water froze on the body!

Now I can't wetsand and have to wait until the next warmer day. what a bitch lol

[87' 325]

haha yeah dude i gave up on the roller paint until springish temps.....it was just unbearable for me....call me a puss but it sucked.

m3 fan, you got any pics of the paint on the actual car(doors, quarter panel,etc)

[Fanzotti]

You're not rolling in that cold are you?

[87' 325]

if lambo doors is talking to me then uhh yeah i did my trunk lid and gave up. M3 fan is too i think.....his looks amazing.

j.k. on the lambo door comment. gehehehe

[golde30]

CA FTW. its like 70deg today.

[Fanzotti]

Don't sweat the Lambo doors comment it's not my car...but if I could get the money together....... Just guessing M3 rolled before it was cold enough to freeze water.... I hope so.... Not sure how that roller paint works but I'm guessing below 50 your running into some problems.

[Garageaholic]

Hey, Yeah I have been rolling in near 25 degree temps. I have a space heater which helps, but the conditions are still not perfect. I hear that painting in the colder temps is actually not Bad for the paint. As for a status, I have finished my 6th coat, have since sanded the whole car down to a very smooth finish tiwh 600 grit. Today i'll start wetsanding EASY with 1000, 1500, then finally 2000. Tomorrow i'm going to polish it and then wax it this weekend. It's looking really good. I'll post shots when I get a chance. I have to borrow my friends car.


Overall Verdict.

Looks: 9/10 (minor sand throughs on inconspicuous areas)
Difficulty: 7/10 (viscosity of paint and sanding is difficult. If you can deal with monotonous work for hours and hours with relatively no payoff, then you can do this job. You need patience!)
Pain-in-the-ass-factor: 10/10 (6 fucking coats, sanding with 600grit in between in the freezing temps. All the extra pieces I had to do separately in the basement and the amount of sandpaper I went thru was a bitch. I would never do this again to the degree that I cared about with this car.)
Cost:10/10 (for the way it turned out, nobody could tell that I spent $150 on this paintjob
Time:5/10 (took me about 2 1/2 months from start to finish, which is about normal for a regular paint job, so I gave it average)
Maintanence:9/10 (I can maintain and re-polish this paint whenever I want and do any kind of work on it without having to deal with a clear coat to blend)
Cleanliness of the job: 3/10 (This was the messiest, dirtiest job I can think of... From the bodywork dust to the wetsanding water. I went through about 25-30 bottles of spray water for wetsanding alone)


That's all I got for now, I'll post some pics up another time.

[ivo316]

I unserstand you SOOOOO much :D .

And i totally share your veredict, it also applies to spraying though ;)

[Garageaholic]

Yeah, I guess you're right. Spraying has it's trade-off's too. How is that going by the way?

[Jscotty]

One thing I learned this winter is not to wash your car at the self-service car washing facility when its below 20 degrees. The mist from the high-pressure sprayer will create a frozen glaze across the entire car. I was trying to knock off the salt spray from the road but after 5 minutes the car was completely covered in ice as if it had been sleeting outside.

[Garageaholic]

LOL. that's actually a blessing in disguise. It will protect the paint from any future salt. HAHA

[Fanzotti]

M3FAN

Hey Man I just want to congratulate you on following through with this and doing your best to get the best possible results. That's a mad amount of work. It seems like you didn't compromise and really pushed to perfect the unknown.

In the spots that you sanded through couldn't you just repaint and sand in those areas?

I just re-did my entire car. Rust, dents, Block sand hi-build primer, Etc. so I have an idea of what you went through. But 6 coats and sanding after each time is crazy. I hear ya, though, Whe I did my car I cared like it was a classic Ferrari. I became obsessed and sometimes pissed I was spending a shitload of time on a paintjob that is probably worth more than the car. But to tell you the truth the results were worth it and now I don't mind making the car worth more than the paint job by slapping performance goodies on it. It does take huge amounts of time to prep a car for paint though, I spread it out over months, I couldn't add up how many hundreds of hours went into it.

My question is do you feel rolling is worth the cost savings? It seems like even more work than a regular spray? I'm guessing the prep work to the point where your ready for your first coat is similar but then having to sand thoroughly between every coat times seems like a PITA to save about 150-450 bucks? Or even less if you buy Ebay paint. I realize that if you spray a car you may sand in between every coat, to knock down the high points but it's a quickie sand. Most time you don't need to on a non-show car paint job.

When I sprayed my car I spent 3 hundy in materials and gave the sprayer 300. I'm sure you could spend less, probably find someone for 100 to spray it after hours and get EBAY supplies for about 150 but I wanted good paint and the guy who sprayed my car was doing it as a favor to his father and is actually a highly skilled custom chopper painter so I didn't want to go too cheap on his tip.

I've seen some pics of these roller paint jobs and they actually look quite good. I cant really tell from pics that there not sprayed. Maintenance/repairs seem to be right up the DIY alley. But, it seems like the reason for these is for the DIY'er who wants to save money. But after you've done all that work do you think next time you'd do it that way or spray it?

Congrats on your efforts!

[Garageaholic]

Thank you!

I would not do it again. I would save my money and have it done professionally.

In those inconspicuous areas where I sanded through, yeah I can lay paint and re-sand. That's definitely an option and I probably will do that as I didn't polish/wax it yet, so it's still workable.

You know my main reason for doing it? It wasn't the cost savings (although it was beneficial). It was honestly because I wanted people to walk up to the car and say, 'wow, that's one nice car, it looks flawless. Where did you get it painted?'. I'd say, 'I painted it with a roller and rustoleum paint, but I did it all myself'. I don't know, I kinda wanted to have that pride in doing it myself.

Does it look like a 4k paintjob? Not exactly, but you really wouldn't notice much of a difference unless you looked at it really really close. I mean really close. I mean, that's why I chose white. Because it shows the least amount of imperfections. With time and patience, anything is really possible if you put your mind to it.

[Jscotty]

I am going to try this. It seems easy enough even though it might be tedious and time consuming. I once attempted to paint my car (a ford mustang) with an airless sprayer but it ended up having that "spray can" look so I went back over it with primer since a smooth even-looking primer coat looks much nicer than a botched paint job. Every so-often someone would comment about how nice my car was going to look once it was painted. I enjoyed all of the "potential" praise so much that I drove my car like that for almost 2 years with tinted windows and a nice set of wheels.

One thing about this technique that I like (after reading about it on the other threads) is that you can do a little bit at a time without any real time constraints or restrictions. I know that you have to let it dry really well before you can go on to the next coat.. but let's say you paint the trunk lid and then an emergency comes up and you have go out before the paint dries- I imagine that you could come back later, wet sand out all of the dirt that it picked up and paint it all over again.

I was a bit curious when M3fan4eva was talking about "rolling" his paint.. I didnt know if this was some kind of industry terminology or what so I went back and read all of the threads and I figured, "Yeah, I can do this". The paint job on my black E30 is very bad.. I have scratches, dings, dents, and really bad cracks on the hood from a botched repair job.

[fwappy]

Just curious cause I haven't heard of someone actually doing this. How does the rolling work, and what type of paint are you using? So there's no clear-coat? How does that work? Thanks, and great effort man.