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As someone who HAS painted professionally in all realms from small touch ups to full resprays, I am here to tell you that, even to a pro, large flat areas are the hardest to do well and large flat HORIZONTAL areas are the worst of all. A bonnet you can remove and stand upright or suspend from the roof to make life easier, you can't do that with a roof unless you are prepared to strip the car and use a rotisserie!
You are facing a place where you can't paint it in one unbroken series as you are, of necessity, starting at the middle and working out, then changing sides and doing it again. Working at a bad angle unless you are 9 ft tall with overspray going everywhere and dust falling constantly.
Further hampering yourself with spitting, dripping aerosol cans (even the very best do this) that don't cover well and require several coats to get sufficient depth of paint, just adds to the impossibility of the task!
If you wan't my advice, get a vinyl roof fitted (or fit one yourself) it's completely in character with the car, a lot easier to get a good finish and, once you tot up ALL the expense of paint and prep, probably almost as cheap as painting it!
Steve
It isn't the issue with a vinyl roof the potential for creating a rot trap and hiding the problem till it is really serious?
My solution to getting an OKish finish is plenty of coats so I can sand away any defects. The problem I found with rattle cans is they just don't lay down that much paint and the cheaper cans seem to have really thin paint in them.
The vinyl roof does have potential to hide rust that wouldn't be there on a painted roof, it's true. But i've removed vinyl roofs from Dolomites and found zero significant rot under them just as often as i've found a bit here and there. Truly rotten roofs with vinyls over usually have extenuating circumstances like sunroofs to blame. In any case, they've ALL had 40-50 YEARS to build up this corrosion, I doubt Mike would have any cause for concern over fitting one now! A vinyl will also hide any minor dents, flaws, filler rings and WHY in the roof that a fresh shiny coat of paint will exaggerate!
I used colour matched acrylic paint in large rattlecans from Jawel (circa £12 each) just to paint out the doorshuts, b posts, inner and outer door window frames and boot shut on my Sprint. That alone used 8 large cans and 4 smaller ones from the factors when I ran out before I was done enough!
Just out of interest, I totted up what I spent on paint and materials to do the whole job, 2k colour, hardener, thinners, 3 sorts of primer, stonechip, satin black rattlecans for sills and tail panel and Vermillion rattlecans for shuts, filler, stopper. 6 quires of assorted grade wet and dry and production paper and a box of 40 grit stickit strips (of which about 60% was actually used) 4 large rolls of 2" masking tape, a roll of brown paper and 1/2 a roll of plastic sheet, 5 litres of panel wipe and 2 boxes of tacky rags. The whole lot came to just shy of £600! People wonder why paintwork is expensive!
I did ALL the prep work, filling, stopping, priming, flatting, guide coat, more flatting, more priming, more guide coats, masking, endless cleaning and de-dusting, I reckon 400+ hours! Letting the bulge into the bonnet and filling and priming to guide coat stage alone took me an estimated 100 hours. So when the pro painter who laid the colour on (he owed me a favour) turned up, he laid 3 coats of 2 pack on, washed his guns out and was on his way home inside an hour!
Even then and with all the hard work and my perfectionist nature, once the colour was on, there were a couple of spots where I could/should have done better! But, at the end of the day, it's a driving car, not a trailer queen/cup hunter, i'll probably live with it!
Steve
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