1973 AC Model 70 Invacar, Visitors & Occasional Distractions

well if it gives you any comfort ive used loads of HMG 1k and its been fantastic. i even rollered my garage doors with it! (and one of them is wood!)

Had an opportunity to do a very quick test of the paint yesterday evening - which was basically 30 minutes setting up the spray gun, wiping the panel down, then the same to clean the spray gun out. Actually painting covered about five minutes.

It's pretty obvious that this is going to be an order of magnitude easier than messing around with rattle cans.







The green blob on the floor is a fair amount of the original paint matching test, spilled courtesy of next door's cat. She is a menace. No huge loss though given the neon peppermint colour didn't seem to really match anything well on the car.

It's not been put down nearly thick enough, I'm fully aware of that. This was just a quick test - a bunch of masking and cleaning will be done before I hopefully do a reasonably complete run round the car. Shouldn't take me long to establish how far the paint is going too so I can see if I need to go and get more well before actually running short. 

It's been a while since I've had a decent A2 rated respirator on. Having a bit of equipment which successfully totally filters out the smell of solvents is *weird* I tell you. You kind of expect goggles to restrict your vision, ear protectors to muffle sound...but to have a little plastic thing that does little to restrict air flow essentially be able to turn smell on and off is something which messes with my head a bit. 

Effective though - was utterly oblivious to how strong the garage was smelling until I took the mask off (after airing the garage out a bit too)... should be effective though given that's why I bought it. 

That was where we left things yesterday.

This evening I had a bit of time to do a bit of further testing.


Step one was to get everything masked off so I can stop worrying about getting paint where I don't want it.



Bit further spraying was done.

Definitely looking a million times better now the front end is mostly one colour.



If you ever wondered if it's worth wearing a mask...well here's what the particulate filters look like now after about an hour and a half.



They were white when we started, and this process has produced about a quarter of the amount of garage fog that the rattle cans do...so yes, make sure you're wearing the correct PPE. It's somehow reassuring to actually see evidence of the filters doing their job.

The only issue I seem to be having is actually getting enough paint onto the car. Think I'll need to experiment with a bit more thinners than the instructions actually recommend to see what happens.









Will do a bit more experimentation with paint mix over the weekend and see if I can get a thicker layer put down (without ending up with runs of course). Feels like we're heading in the right direction, even though there's a fair way to go yet. 

I'm in no way an expert on these matters but if its not atomizing nicely might the nozzle be too big?

Edit, i only say this as when i painted my van i got great results using my little (cheap) gravity door shut gun bit stuggled with my mates (cheap) suction gun. It was only after i realised the nozzle in my mates gun was a bit too big for what i was doing. It was doing the same kind of thing yours is.

Have you tried rollering it on, I`ve used rollers with polyurethane on boats to good effect.

Gravity feed, and this is the third time it's ever seen paint. Everything that comes off has done so after each use. Bought new a couple of weeks ago, so not been sitting with old paint clogging it up for decades.

Just the thinners sprays lovely. It's just with the paint it struggles. I did get it to behave well at one point, but that was watered down to nearly 1:1 rather than 5:1 (paint:thinner) which is the maximum recommended dilution on the sheet which came with the paint.

The only way I seem to be able to get any appreciable flow through it is to have the needle wound wide open, though from the comments about jets being too large I do wonder if there's mileage in further experiments at the other end of the scale. Though I've always started out as per the manual with everything fully closed and just increased until I get acceptable results...though I've never really got that far to be honest. Yet.

Not condescending at all. It's really useful advice and confirms I'd translated the Chinglish from the manual properly.

Air pressure was set based on having a T-piece attached at the gun with it wide open. 30psi the manual asks for was about an indicated 40psi on the reg - though it goes to 150psi, sothe gauge probably isn't the most accurate.

I've seen exactly the effect with too much thinners in the paint, so am aware of the dangers of that.

Our garage is well insulated, ambient temperature was 23C, even before the compressor started chucking heat out.

I'll try to snap a couple of photos tomorrow if I get time, but this is the gun I've been using if that's useful for anyone.

1mm nozzle?
I was using celly, my little gun has a 0.6mm nozzle and sprays nicely and the paint lays down well.
My friends bigger gun had a 0.8mm nozzle and it wasnt atomizing fine enough to leave a decent gun finish, like your saying yours is doing.

I know paints differ and ive no idea what your paint would need but this all seems familiar to me.

I'm a total novice at this paint spraying thing though.

That sort of eyeballing the mixture trick is the sort of thing that it's invaluable to pick up on.

I've done a bit more experimentation today and I think the observation that it's not an ideal setup for full panels is spot on. I've been using a random box in the garage as my test area and have had a nice spray laying down there - but it's a very small area. Back on the car it felt like I was blowing paint down a straw again.

If the surface was pristinely smooth it would probably be fine, but being less than stellar glass fibre (even discount my ratty repairs) I think is making throwing a reasonably wet layer down more important than it otherwise would be.

I do wonder if some of the modern paints are just thicker by nature, this stuff is obviously far thicker than any cellulose I've used (which is the only thing I've sprayed with before - albeit a couple of decades ago and was handed the gun already set up). Obviously that can be somewhat compensated for by adding thinners, but there are limits to what you can get away with there...though the trick mentioned above is definitely something I'll try.

It is moderately thick. I can pull numbers from the datasheet tomorrow, but I don't have it in front of me right now.

Someone didn't spot this came with two nozzle sizes. Here's the same thing but with a 1.5mm nozzle.

Wish I'd spotted that before I bought the 1mm one. Oops.