First painting

I'm giggly. The first paint is on the car. I took the headlight bucket into Johnson's paint and matched up a metallic pretty close. I had the paint codes for the original blue. (PPG 14760 in case any one is interested). Of course, since I wanted a metallic blue, it didn't make a difference. You can't just add metal flake to a solid paint. The paint itself has to be translucent.

So I did the best I could with paintchips and the headlight bucket. It doesn't really matter since I'm painting the whole car...It could be pink if I was so inclined. But I wanted it to be representative of the original color.

Today I painted and it looks fantastic. There are a couple of spots here and there that will need to be fixed, but since this is my first shoot, I expected that, and bought extra paint. It is however VERY good. It could be left as is and 95% of people would never see the flaws.

It took three coats of blue to cover everything completely, and then two coats of clear to make it shine. I'll finish painting the rest of the car, and put it together. Then I'll probably scuff it all up again, add one last coat of blue and two more coats of clear, and it'll be perfect.

Pictures: