Porsche Enthusiasts Club Forum

Need my S2 re spraying ( and some arch work ) its guards red.

A. Door shut spray will suffice.

Looking for a decent job but don't have 3k to throw at it, besides I can't even find a garage willing to do a full respray, seems they only want the single panel work.

Any DIY enthusiasts out there with a home set up willing to take it on ? Will pay a fair price.

I've got lots of photos from every angle, if anyone want to give me a quote or I can drive it over.

I live in Chesterfield but I'm willing to travel.

Worth a try.

Thanks

Paul

Wrong time of the year to try & do it at home unless a garage with heating. I'm sure there will be a local repair guy who'll take it on, especially if A. you do some of the prep & B. are flexible on start & finish times.

Try Cavendish Classics just south of Derby (M1 J24 next to PH Sportscars)
01332 792666 / 07912 123543
Does a good job at a fair price I think & loads of experience with 944's

You could also try Jimmy Kirk in Wirksworth 075968 622640 - did a job on my Civic track car a few years back - was cheap, but effective. I did some of the prep work (such as it was) to keep costs down.

Ed

Jimmy the Chin!

Theres a pretty good fellow in the garage in Middleton by Wirksworth now, which was occupied by Jimmys friend who introduced us.

I knew you'd appear on this thread Simon

I used to paint cars back in the 90's, it was something my father trained me to do during my apprenticeship and really interested me, ended up becoming a bit of an intense hobby and even had quite a good spray booth setup and got well known in the custom painting world. But alas, getting the very best finish, for me, meants being able to get close to the paint, which meant not wearing a mask, which then led to caughing up coloured flem of whatever colour I had painted last and the wife back then made me stop..

The problem is, you want a "decent job", and that is really subjective.. Estimating the expectations of the customer and meeting them, is the hardest thing in the paint world, where smoke and mirrors is really part of a refinishers day to day grind.

I do not know of anyone who does a really proper job, because, its not profitable to do a perfect job.. On the cars I painted, I would spend anything from 40 hours, to 200 hours perfecting the prep, anything from 4 hours painting and babysitting the car between coats, monitoring the film drying and tweaking/retarding its flashing rates, and about 40 hours post paintwork perfecting and pampering following the paint job, the final article was way better than comes out of any factory, and there are only a couple of painters in the world I know who put in that kind of effort, one is in Ohio, and the other is in Surrey, both charge anything from £10k to £50k on a paintjob.

Now the reason I mention this, is this kind of level of detail is the only way you meet everyones expectations... Its a bit like asking for your portrait to be painted.. Any one of my friends could do it if they had the inclination, even if they are not artists, but your pretty certainly not going to be happy with it, likewise, some people had their portraits painted by some of the greatests artists of all time, and were not happy with the outcome.

The paintwork is only ever as good as the prep, and I am often amazed that any painter would be happy painting something that someone else had prepped.. Unless of course, they take comfort in the "Well if I had done the prep..." get out of jail card..

So the problem is.. Anyone who is going to give you a good finish, is going to not be doing it from home... My first cars I painted were passable, they looked fine, but as my skills progressed, my standards went up, I can now see a serious amount of defects in every paint job I see and I am never happy with the paint on any car, weather it be a new Porsche, Lambo, Ferrari or Rolls Royce.

What I am getting at is this.. If you meet someone willing to paint your car, weather it be for £500 or £10,000, how is he going to know how good a job you want? and will he deserve not to be paid, if you do not get the quality you are expecting?

From a painters perspective, there are a large amount of variables and levels of painting quality and not really the language or units of measurement to describe them.. But not only this, unless your painting the car in a booth and using good kit and good quality materials, it is impossible to even be repeatable, and guarantee the same quality finish every time, however hard the painter tries.

My advice, if you really want a cheap paint job, buy a bonnet, a compressor, some guns and materials and start teaching yourself to spray... Once you can get the bonnet looking like you want it, then you will be ready to have a go on your car, and if your not happy with that, keep re-doing it until you are happy and find your own comfort level of quality... If you're anything like I was, you will find the learning curve really satisfying and that spraying is the easy bit, which is over way too fast, as it is also the most satisfying bit.. but the prep, takes forever, and although can be theraputic, it is so hard to resist painting the car too soon.

There are a couple of people on here who spray cars for a living, they may or may not agree with me, but it would be interesting to hear their thoughts.

Thanks Jon for your very interesting and in-depth post regarding spraying. It was refreshing to get your perspective! I will be going down the respray route at some time in the future and will certainly bear what you have said in mind.

One thing I would add is it is getting difficult to spray at home due to paint legislation and paint types. Wasn't too much of a problem back in the days of celly, etc...but these new paints are quite toxic and require careful handling and PPE (respirators, masks, coveralls, etc). However, there are some that can be used but you do have to shop around.

Oh tell me about it..

When I first learned to spray, it was with my dad, who bought his guns back home from the workshop, along with some materials and a six foot tall oxygen cylinder and he taught me the basics of spraying at home when I was just a school boy, using celulose... He also taught me how to spray using oil based gloss paints, the benefits (you would not believe) of using leaded petrol as a thinner (when it was available) and much more... Trench warfare painting techniques which would scare the hell out of environmentalists, Health and Safety and much more... Yet now one batted an eyelid in those days.

These days, yes, if you value your health, you will use a mask with any kind of paint spraying, but if it is two pack paint, then use an air fed visor which is fed from an oil-less compressor, have some form of extraction, filtration and away from the public..

In theory, if you had a barn, or a lockup in some tucked away location, you could line it with rolls of clear polythene, get some charcol filter matting for a vent, and some filtration material and a fan to blow air into the workshop (filtered), and heat the workshop with some domestic radiators, fed from a boiler in another room with its own air supply.. yes.. spraying is extremely flammable and potentially explosive... More so when you spray with pure oxygen!! (My dad was very slightly nuts!)

Was that when you lived on Potton Rd ?

Yep that was the place Pauly!

The back garden had about a 30 foot long workshop where as a pre-teen I learned how to spray, how to use a drill press and set up my first business at 12 years old buying dice from the market in St Neots, drilling them so I could bond in tyre valve caps and sell them to kids with BMX bikes which became a mini craze at the time in the early 80's.. Also in that little workshop I built my first trike using a honda C90 front forks, brakes and wheel, a yamaha FZ tank seat and a beam rear axle from a robin reliant converted to chain drive when I was 13!

My first air cooled engine (912) strip down was in my dads business workshops in Wyboston just up the road when I was about 8 in 1979.. He thought it would be fun.. My mom still complains how I came home black from head to toe.

Happy days!

You could have made a lot more money painting the ringers some of the locals were selling

Oh there were certainly some serious characters and lovable rogues around that area!

Not sure any of them had the professionalism, dedication or brains to ring a car though did they? That would have been a bit like James Bond, Oceans-11 or Mission Impossible.. Although, there was the sister of one of my mums friends who's husband ran a garage somewhere around there and vanished off to prison for a while for being "very very bad" and something to do with a car, although I never was told what exactly he did!

I do remember one funny thing about spraying though, one of my fathers customers wanted a respray and his jaw hit the floor at the price, so my dad offered him a couple of options to save money.

Option 1 - The car to be resprayed properly, stripped down to a shell, painted with good materials and rebuilt. V-Expensive. (outcome would be perfect)

Option 2 - The car to be resprayed without being stripped down completely, prepped, carefully masked, painted with good materials. Quite expensive. (outcome would be great, but not ideal)

Option 3 - The car to be resprayed without being stripped down, carefully masked and painted with gloss paint, good value. (outcome same as 2, would look great to start with, but who knows what it might look like one day!)

Option 4 - Same as option 3, but no masking at all, the customer would be given a bucket of petrol and a rag, to wipe off overspray on windows, trim, tyres, while my dad would be painting it.. Very cheap and very funny. (outcome, car would be less than perfect, owner would have to be careful and would likely end up painted guards red himself!!)

The customer went for option 1, where he would get the best finish... everything else just increased the amount of variables that may lead to disappointment... Which I think the moral of this story is (for garage work as well as painting).. Unless you can get the best job done, you are likely to end up unhappy, how can you negotiate the grey area of less than perfect and end up with the sprayer (or mechanic!) being able to hit your level of expectations perfectly?

Quality remains, long after the pain of cost is forgotten.

Some of the local "characters" were definitely at it back then and they ended up doing porridge for their sins. This was all 30+ years ago though.