STRIP
Our preferred method of initial preparation after dismantling your car is to strip to bare metal.
There are several methods to achieve this:
- Manual strip by paint stripper
- Mechanical method using a variety of tools and wheels, discs and attachments
- Media blast using various types of media - garnet, glass, soda etc
- Dip stripping.
Our preferred method is dip stripping, mainly because it leaves a totally clean, rust free surface which is ready to prime and in our opinion is actually the best value for money when you consider it kills all the rust in place we can't even see let alone get to.
We will however use any method requested for your job.
The above list is in price order starting at around $3000.00 and going up to around $6000.00 for a mid size car.
PREP
Obviously not every car we paint will be stripped to bare metal. Not every car requires this much work especially for a basic repaint.
We do paint a lot of cars with much less intensive preparation.. This does however effect any kind of paint guarantee we can provide as we can't be sure of the substrate or original paint and how it was applied especially on older vehicles that have usually had some paintwork done.
The prep time varies but we can say that an average size panel will take one to two hours to properly prep for priming, assuming the existing paint is sound and not flaking.
So you could say broadly speaking that to prep a car for primer (or topcoat), with sound existing paint that doesn't need repairs, will take anywhere from 12 to 30 hours.
PRIME & PAINT
Once it's all prepped and masked, (masking can take a day - the less we take the car apart the more we have to mask), we can apply some primer. Not all of the car will have to be primed, sometimes very little will need primer, sometimes all of it. So we can spend anywhere from an hour to a day in the booth priming.
Once the primer has hardened, at least a day, we can re-prep in readiness for painting. This is difficult to put a time on and will depend on how much has been primed and how straight we find the panel work is after block sanding. And whether we have to re-prime.
Once the prep is all done and we have re-masked we can get it in the booth and put the final colour on. Again this is hard to put a time on dependent on colour and whether it is a single layer (straight colour), two layer or even three layer if a modern colour is chosen. Usually on a straight forward repaint the final colour application won't take more than a day.