ALT-5 Tips for Painting your Car yourself
Painting a car yourself is not as ludicrous as you might think and for most automobiles, it shouldn't cost you more than thirty dollars or so. I have done it many times with excellent results. No one in their right mind is going to paint a relatively new car that already has a good paint job. Those who contemplate painting their own car typically have an older model car with a terrible paint job and simply want to improve the looks of the automobile.
No special equipment is necessary to paint the car yourself. All you actually need is duct tape and newspaper. Before you condemn the idea, let me say that I rolled my eyes when Bob, my bother-in-law, told me he was going to paint his work truck with ordinary aerosol paint. It came as a shock to me because he was a reasonably intelligent man and not prone to foolishness. Furthermore, the truck he wanted to paint was a decent automobile that simply had a faded paint job.
There were a number of us working guys who hung out at a local donut shop in town and I felt like Bob had just made himself look stupid when he said he was going to paint his truck with aerosol paint. Without hesitation, I told him it was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard of and that he was just going to make it look worse and end up having to take it to a professional. It was a careless waste of time and money. The rest of the guys agreed wholeheartedly.
The very next morning when I pulled into the parking lot of the donut shop, the guys were all gathered around Bob's Dodge Ram pickup. I couldn't see the truck the way they were all huddled around it, but as I parked my little Toyota, I was thinking he'd probably gone ahead and painted the truck and likely as not, the guys were all laughing at it. But as I approached, I couldn't believe my eyes. It looked like a professional paint job. The truck had been a dull white, but that morning, it was a shinny white with red trim.
With coffee and smokes in hand, we congregated around the truck and argued about how long the paint job would last. Some actually accused him of messing with us, believing he got it professionally painted and that he was trying to see if we'd believe he actually painted it himself. But Bob cleared that up right away by taking a bucketful of empty aerosol paint cans out of the back of the truck.
Most all of us had a vehicle we used strictly for work and weren't particularly concerned with their appearance, but for less than thirty dollars, Bob made a tremendous difference in the looks of his truck along with adding value to it. It did look like a professional paint job!
About a week and a half later, one of the other guys came driving up in his old step van, which was a dull mustard yellow the day before, but he had painted it with aerosol paint and it was a shinny light maroon. Standing there that morning, looking at the difference in the vehicles, glancing at my dull blue & white Toyota, I decided to try it myself. I figured it couldn't look much worse than it already did.
Bob said he used the metallic spray paint so that's what I got and the color I chose was light gray. Then I got a roll of duct tape and a newspaper. Parking the truck in the driveway, I taped newspaper over the windows, chrome and anything I didn't want to paint. Actually, that was the most time consuming. The rest was fairly quick and easy.
Once I got it all taped up, I started at the top and with a sweeping motion, I sprayed the paint on and let it stand for about an hour. Then I attached some decals and ripped the newspaper off. It was incredible. The little Toyota looked like new and I couldn't wait to show it off.
Well that's when they all jumped on the "paint your car yourself" kick and by the end of the week, each of us had a new paint job for less than thirty dollars and we had Bob to thank.
That was three years ago and the paint job looks just as good today as it did the day I painted it. But I agree with one of the guys who said that even if the paint faded, for thirty dollars, you can paint it again or change the color anytime you want to. But my truck was so small it didn't take as much paint and cost less than twenty-five dollars and it looked so good, I just left it the way it was.
But I painted other cars that way and they all looked great. If you're still skeptical, I'm sure you can find somebody that's got an old junkie car siting around you can experiment on or go to the junk yard. I'm telling you it WORKS!
