The SIMPLE Trick If You Don't Have A Paint Booth!

Well, welcome back to another episode of Paint Society, and thanks for joining me on this episode. My name is Brian, and I want to welcome you to Paint Society. It's a channel where we learn a lot of do-it-yourself, professional-level, expert tips as well. Well, today, we're working on a project for AHC Garage, another channel I do a lot, a lot of classic Honda work for, so you want to make sure you go ahead and subscribe to that channel. Now, today, I'm going to show you a trick on how to get cleaner finishes before you clear coat. Let's go ahead and dive in and see what we got going on. And a lot of my enthusiasts probably already know what this is, so weigh down in the comments and, well, let me know what the chassis is, what the car is, and I'll let you know if you are right. We already got the roof painted. I like to paint the roof ahead of time just because for reach-over purposes. So we're going to go ahead and get this thing cleaned up, and then I'm going to spray some base, and I'm going to show you what we do with the base and make sure it's nice and smooth before clear. Now, after the car has been all wiped up and cleaned up, you have everything prepared already in 600 grit. Now, for a solid color, you can go between 400 and 600, and this is actually primer, red primer. We're not going to seal it only because you get a slightly cleaner job if you sand your primer, and, well, we don't need the sealing right now because everything is nice and clean, and, well, we're going to use our DV1, of course, to spray our Milano red base coat, all right? So let's get down a couple coats, get full coverage, and then I'll show you what that trick is. I just finished putting down that second coat of base, and you can see it looks really, really good. Now, the next step or trick that I'm going to show you and the purpose of this video is, well, I get a lot of questions, Brian, do I have to sand my base or why didn't you sand your base? And there's a lot of confusion in that regard. Do you need to sand your base? Absolutely not. I could clear that right now and it would still look beautiful, but for the purpose of demonstration and getting a slightly cleaner job, we're going to sand our last coat of base coat before we add one more coat down. Now, who is this really going to help? This is going to help the guys in the garage that don't have a nice paint booth like this or a good filtration system that is going to have some dust. See, here's the thing. A lot of you think that your base laid down smooth, it looks great, and all of a sudden you got a whole bunch of dirt in your clear and it just appeared out of nowhere, but you don't realize it was there all along and the clear just highlighted it. So to help us solve that issue, we're using our K800 by Kovacs Eagle abrasives sandpaper. And I like these because they're little hand sheets and well, we've seen these papers on a channel quite often, but never used like this, okay? They make a hand pad and then they make an interface pad. This interface pad will actually attach to this block and they have a hard block that goes here as well. You can kind of change them out. Now they will say the hand pad works very well and it does, but I prefer the interface block because it has a little bit more of a cushion. I like to use K800 because it cuts at the speed of like a P600, but it's going to leave a nice fine scratch. I want to go any finer or more aggressive than this. I think it's a good, good grit. Now let me show you what we're going to do with this. And you can only do this trick if your base coat is 100% dry. Give it a good 20-30 minutes. Let it really cure because you don't want to go ripping on your base coat. Now, will this work with water-based? I don't know. I don't spray water-based. I do know it works very well with solvent. What's the reason why we're doing this? Let me show you. Basically, it's for the things that we can't see. Although this is pretty smooth, when we run this over, okay, we might be able to see that in this area, there's a little bit of a dust nib. Well, that would become a dust nib in the clear coat. So I don't want to go too aggressive. So all I'm going to do is lightly go over it just like this. And believe it or not, this is leveling it out. With two coats of base, it can sometimes, if you don't have your gun set up properly, lay a touch rough. So we're just going to gently look at here. You can see that is a dust nib where it's kind of shiny in that area. Okay. So if we see something like that, we'll go over it a little bit and we'll leave it. Now, the only downside to this is you got to be careful because it can cause dust. So that's why I like the 800 because it really doesn't rip into the base. It kind of just highlights, hey, Brian, you've got a couple of areas here. Just give that a little couple of extra passes. All right. And now what this is going to do is it's going to really smooth it out before we put one more last coat of base on. And don't be afraid if it starts to get dirty, just kind of wipe it off and get it clean again. Okay. We want to make sure we have clean paper and change it up. I'm never a fan of using the same paper if it's worn out. If it's worn out, go and get another piece. It's very, very simple. All right. So we're just letting it glide. And this is pretty much a visual aid showing us, hey, actually, Brian, you did a pretty good job laying down the base because it's pretty smooth, but you did get a couple of nibs here and there, and that's fine. All right. So we'll just do this on this panel and we'll move to the other side. I'm not going to worry about the jams and all that. That stuff naturally isn't too smooth anyways. So we come here and you can see that we're just doling it up. You can see how it's a little bit dull. Okay. We cannot clear over this. Okay. You cannot clear over this because we're taking away pigment. All right. If you were to clear over this, you might see some streaks or maybe some lighter spots. Now, the reason why we do it now is because we got our coats on there. We have our coverage, right? And since we have our coverage, all right, that means that the paint is going to be built up a little bit higher, and it's going to be our last step before applying one more coat and then our clear coat. You can see right here, there's a little bit of area right there, so we'll just give that a little bit of a sand. It doesn't need to be perfectly leveled out. Just smooth it out a little bit. We don't want to dig into it too much. All right. You'll be astonished at what a good clear will cover and build up over. All right. We'll leave it just like that. Next up, we're going to use another clean rag or microfiber, and we're going to use a water-based cleaner. And I like to spray this instead of actually spraying the car because this stuff is not going to dry easily. This is the same thing as Sprayway Glass Cleaner, so my guys at home, you go ahead and pick up some of that. And simply just going to wipe the panel and get all that dirt off. Now, this is going to get a little bit dirty, this rag, but I'd rather have a dirty rag and a clean paint job. And once again, visually checking, making sure we don't have any spots that need any sort of attention. There we go. We're almost to the clear coat stage. Now, once again, you'll see this whole build on AHC Garage. That's another channel I do a lot of work for, a lot of classic cars, NSXs you might see in the shop, Civic Hatches, Integras, all those cars of my time being restored back to life. It's a pretty cool thing. A couple of things I do want to clear up. This trick's going to work a lot better on a solid color just because we're not messing with those metallics too much. And you really want to use nothing more aggressive than 800, especially on metallic. I might even use a 1000 grit. You're going to need to reapply at least one coat on a solid. And if you have a metallic color, maybe one, one and a half, just to make sure everything is oriented. Because once you sand it back down, you're kind of starting at a point where you're going to need to make sure your blend is still good. So also keep that in mind. This trick works well for guys that are doing their blend and then the blend is just becoming way too rough and they're getting sand piling. It's kind of a good way to start over. All right, hit the reset button. So let's go ahead and knock down one more quick coat of base. This coat of base is no different from the first and the second. And that will give you a much smoother finish that is ready for our clear coat. Let's take a look at the clear coat. And then we'll go ahead and get started spraying. This is our clear coat. It's all mixed up. We'll be using the HTE 360 Carbonero 1.2. Let's get spraying. Just finished laying down that second coat and I just checked it out. It looks absolutely stunning. A very, very, very clean job. Now, this whole vehicle, like we mentioned earlier in our episode, is going to be on AHC Garage. So we'll leave a link down in the description so you can check out the full build from when we got it and all the stages all the way until the end. Now, you'll see me over on the channel. We're going to finish up the rest of the parts on this build and we'll do a nice sand and buff to get it nice and beautiful and a little bit more flatter than the OEM would. I hope you learned something with this simple trick. Like always, all products will be in the description if you want to go ahead and check it out. Makes your life easier. Now, do you need this? No. You can use a 800 grit. The only thing that you're going to benefit from is this has very soft edges. It's a very soft sandpaper so it's not going to rip or cut into your base. Guys, if you have the right tool, your job's going to go a lot better. Take my recommendation because I've been there before. I hope you learned something from the video. If you want to support the channel, head over to paintsocietystore.com. As always, check out our Instagram. A lot of great information always over there. Guys, this is Brian from Paint Society reminding you, don't overthink it. It's just paint. Let's check this thing out.