Paint question.....

[flyin'eye]

OK, El Ranchito is ready for paint. Here's what I'm doing: White acrylic enamel, with scallops over it, urethane clear over that. (Before someone tells me I should use base/clear, I'm doing it this way because I have all the materials free of charge, and it's a BUDGET project.) Here's the lowdown: I'm going to shoot the car Friday night with White enamel. Saturday morning, I'll lay out the scallops, shoot them in silver covered with HOK blue. Unmask it, and shoot the whole thing in Urethane clear. Now for the question. The enamel calls for hardener. Should I use hardener in it, even though the clear will have hardener? I'm thinking I should just cut down the amount of hardener. Whatta y'all think?

[SwitchBlade327]

if you use a single stage first you'll need to scuff up the whole car after it dries, then do your scallops and stuff. It'll have to be scuffed for the paint to stick. It'll work it'll just take longer, and yeah youll use the hardener unless you want your paint to be wet for a long long time. A kid at school mixed his paint wrong and three days after he painted it you could still leave finger prints in the paint, and that's just because he didn't use enough hardener, i dunno if it'd ever dry without any. Maybe lownslow or someone will give ya a little more info if I'm not right about all this.

[flyin'eye]

That's what I was thinking, no hardener, the paint won't set up. According to the tech sheets, you can recoat in up to 12 hours. I assume I won't have to scuff it if I'm within that time frame.(which should be no problem)

[67Imp.Wagon]

You should just buy you some white basecoat. You've already got the clear and thats the expesive stuff.Not sure what brand clear you have but you can get a quart of Omni for about 20 bucks.If you have a HVLP gun you would only need 2 maybe 3 quarts depending on size of the car. You would'nt have to worry about anything happening when you shoot your clear.

I'm not even sure you can shoot Urethane over Enamel. Anyone done this before?

I've thought about shooting my car in enamel and then useing basecoat and clear just for scallops but have never looked into it to see if it can be done. If anyone has done this post up. I would be interested to hear the results.

Switchblade is right on the enamel. You gota put some hardner in it.

[flyin'eye]

Yes, you can shoot urethane clear over acrylic enamel, I've done it many times at work. I just wasn't sure about adhesion of hardened enamel.....