Painting the underside – part 3

Saturday morning was time to get painting – and the weather obliged with a half decent day to do it in!

So after a quick check over the car and a rub down to get some metal ready residue off, we were ready to start. The car had picked up a bit of flash rust over the two days since doing the metal ready:

tr7-rear-end-treated-with-metal-ready

But no big deal, and most of it came off with a quick rub.

So, down to the painting. I started on the underside of the floor panels, I figured it would be best if I got the difficult bits out of the way first. And it certainly was difficult – there’s about 1 foot of clearance under there, which makes dipping a paintbrush, moving it to the part of the car you’re painting, and getting the paint onto the metal, very fiddly and messy! And because I was painting upside down, the paint kept running down the brush and onto my hand.
Regardless, I got it done, and was a reasonably tidy job:

tr7-rear-end-painted-with-por-15-6

While I was doing that, Amy was busy at the back end, and we slowly worked our way into the middle, her doing the wheelarches while I sat in the fuel tank cavity. Overall, the first coat took about an hour and a half.

The instructions say to recoat after the first coat is touch dry (But with a slight ‘drag’), which should take anywhere between two and six hours, depending on humidity. I guess it must have been quite humid, because by the time we’d stopped for a cup of tea, the first coat was dry enough to paint over.
So off we went again, much quicker the second time around as this was more of a patch coat to go over the thin parts from the first coat. I had one incident where I got stuck to the tarp, lifting it up and spilling my paint can(!), but I just used the puddle of paint as an impromptu can to finish off.

overall, we’re quite happy with the results, although the visual impact isn’t as great as I was hoping (probably because the colour is close to metal anyway), it certainly looks clean and tidy. I think it’ll look great with the black topcoat on!

tr7-rear-end-painted-with-por-15-5

tr7-rear-end-painted-with-por-15

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tr7-rear-end-painted-with-por-15-3

tr7-rear-end-painted-with-por-15-2

 

If some of those pics appear patchy, it’s because they were taken after just the first coat, and were still partly wet.

Overall, a pretty good job, if a bit messy – we’re both covered in paint that won’t come off now! We did wear gloves and so on (in fact I had a full body coverall on), but some spillage was inevitable.

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