Matt, I am also a newbie painter.... I spent months researching this stuff and trying to decide which way to go. If you have created a fixed amount that you want to spend on your truck, then that will dictate your options. I taught myself body working with my project so I am still learning, and still have a lot to learn...so maybe a more experienced body & paint guy will chime in.. There are a variety of ways to go about painting a truck. Here's what I chose to do:
If you are planning on going down to bare metal, one contemporary practice is to lay down 2 coats of epoxy primer right over the bare metal after either media blasting or prepping the metal with 80 grit on a DA sander. Then rust repair/panel beating, then touch-up epoxy over the areas that you had to strip. Then the body filler goes on and you sand and get the panels exactly how you want them. If you sanded through the epoxy, then you apply another coat of epoxy (or just touch up areas that you sanded through). When the panels are straight and no metal is showing, then you apply 2-3 coats of hi-build primer, and resume your block sanding until it's as perfect as you can get it. Then another coat of epoxy (mixed with reducer) to seal everything. Then you can shoot your paint. Which finishing sandpaper grit to use between each product is determined by the manufacturer's product sheet and/or your own personal experience.
The other, more old school (and probably cheaper) route seems to be to use body filler over bare metal, then etch primer, then paint. Some guys don't put on a sealing coat before paint, while others do. It seems that most guys seal the primer before laying down paint, though. I have no idea how cheaply you could do this second process.
A couple hundred bucks won't cover it. It might not even cover the cost of 2 gallons of decent SS paint. I have done all the work myself and in materials alone (epoxy + activator, hi-build primer, body filler, sanding blocks, sandpaper rolls, shop towels, special cleaner/degreaser, masking tape, SS urethane paint, reducer, hardener, mixing cups, HF paint gun, filters and filter media, etc...
I probably have over $1400 in materials already. That's not including a quality DeVilbiss gun I bought to lay the paint down (Which was worth it). I used quality materials at the best prices I could find. The paint was upper middle-of-the-road quality urethane SS. Sometimes if you choose to work with less-than-quality materials it becomes so time consuming/frustrating/unpleasant, that the extra money you might spend on better materials is well worth it.
You can go the Rustoleum route (or other industrial/tractor paint) and save yourself a world of time and money. It's a truck, after all- right?
It all depends what you want at the end of the process... I almost went with Rustoleum, but after I considered how much time I was going to be putting into the prep, I felt that my time and effort body working and prepping would be wasted after covering it with something that was not going to endure another 60 years.
I've spent hours online watching guys roll-on or spray Rustoleum with results that seem pretty amazing to me....but I don't think it belongs on a restoration.
There are many opinions regarding how you should paint a car, and many of them are coming from guys who have been doing it for many years, and plenty of them don't agree with each other, so it is easy to become lost in the world of painting... good luck, on whatever you decide to do!
Last edited by Norcal Dave; 07/11/2017 8:00 AM.
