DIY: Stop having an ugly paint job

Does your car look like this?

What some of you may not know is that with this same paint, you can make your car look like you CAN afford a paint job that costs a few grand.

If you did follow the original DIY on how to spray paint your car then you probably know that it's not the easiest to clean and in certain lighting it may not look so great, but, I will address that problem in this DIY.

First, you need to paint your car with spray paint. I chose White $0.90 Walmart paint. The cheapest, crappiest paint available. I did a primer coat with flat white to completely cover up all the different color values that were on my car.

Then I bought gloss white, same walmart 90 cent spray paint, but gloss this time. Spray painted the entire car very very thoroughly. You should not be able to see through your new paint, I chose white which was the hardest, going darker is much easier and I would definitely recommend it. So what is so much different from this DIY?

Well if you did the first DIY right your paint should look something like this.

Which we can all agree looks better than primer, but still doesn't look like a real paint job. This is the SAME paint, I have not added clear coat, it is not wet, and most importantly it only cost me 5 dollars to do.

(Front end only)

So, how is that possible?

Well I'll show you.

First, make sure you have let your paint dry. 48 hours at LEAST is recommended.

After the spray paint you want to buy a pack of 1500 grit sand paper, and a pack of 2000 grit sand paper. I've used several packs cause I get lazy and want to use a brand new piece of sand paper every five minutes cause it's easier that way. Take out all the pieces of sand paper from the packs and cut them in half. Now the size of the sand paper will fit much better in your hand and you will get a lot more out of it this way. Fill spray bottles with water, put a few drops of soap in the water and shake it up. Saturate the surface that you've spray painted completely and start sanding! Continue to spray the surface constantly as you sand. You will mentally select areas of the surface you're wet sanding in your head as you sand. Each area needs to be wet sanded until completely smooth with the 1500 grit. You might think it's taking a long time, it is. You want to be able to run your 1500 grit sand paper over the wet surface and feel absolutely no friction. At this point you want dry the surface and get your eyes level with the surface you're wet sanding and check for any rough patches. You will almost certainly encounter some. I usually take a pencil and scribble on the rough patches and sand until all the pencil is gone. Once all the rough patches are gone you want to wet sand the entire surface with the 2000 grit for maybe 10 seconds in a certain spot and then switch areas, until the entire surface has been wet sanded with the 2000 grit just a little bit. After that you should have a very smooth surface.

After that you'll want to hand buff and hand wax the surface and it will look like mine. Do NOT use a power buffer on the surface and don't take it through a machined car wash until the paint has been settled for weeks. I hand wash and wax my paint anyway, but it should be safe after some considerable time. Bumpers are especially hard to get to shine 100% Metal surfaces such as fenders and doors are much easier to work with. The door that I pictured took 2 hours to wet sand completely, so if you think it shouldn't be taking so long to do, your probably wrong.

I hope someone out there does this, you will not regret your results. A showroom paint job from walmart IS possible. Stop driving around with that ugly primer ;)