I painted for 2 1/2 years, it's a pain in the ass. Was that blunt enough? I actually painted bathtubs, but it's identical to painting cars. Painting is easy, after about 10 years
or if you have a good teacher, I didn't. The guy who taught me was great at his job, but I never got any training on the details of spraying, so quallity wasn't what I specialized in. In the proper enviroment I could do a very good job, however I learned 1 very important thing, let someone with the experience do the job, and the problems I've heard about with macco have nothing to do with their sprayers. If you read the porsche lits thread then you know it all, notice all the negatives start with "the economy special"? If your job is the $1700 job then expect good results, I plan to take my '88 325is to them as well as both my '82 and '83 633Csi, my F250, a couple of BMW 2002's, the VW Vanagon, possibly the M3 and SVX if they do an excellent job on the lower level cars.
Prep is easy, time consuming and you must be able to find small imperfections, but you can redo it as many times as you need to in order to get it right. Find a mentor if you need to, but I would recomend your own prep and know what grit of paper they want the final project to be sanded in before they get it. Making friends at the shop is important too, when you see hundreds of cars a month a personal relatoinship makes a big difference. I didnt realize how muck good prep matered untill I tried to sand off some rattle can patch paint I used, it was a real PITA, clean paint is inportant, as well as the proper grit of sandpaper. With the paint I used I could get away with sanding to 220 with the DA sander, also known as the Palm sander or random orbital, and get excellent results, but diferent paints will respond in diferent ways.
OK, now I feel I have made myself feel important, and possibly made up for those one word posts
Smiley Tic Tac Toe anyone?
BTW, I'll be working on my paint tomorrow
gotta make that car nice again!
Karl