Starting to Look Good

Over the weekend I was able to get my fifth coat of paint on the Vanagon. This was the first time that I painted over an 800 grit wet sand pass and wow am I impressed. The surface is certainly not perfect but at this point it at least looks really glossy and reflective. The reflection is slightly distorted but that is to be expected without any sanding. The bad news is that I'm still not at a point where the paint is completely opaque. I don't know how many more coats will be needed but I'm hoping for around two. I am certainly going to need to make at least two more sanding passes before I turn to the buffer but I am pleased with the progress so far. At this point the van is really close to looking nice and I'm really excited to continue moving along on the project. I just hope the weather holds out so I can get this work done before winter really sets in.

Progress Update

I've got the Vanagon about 80% wet sanded with 800 at this point. I was really happy to see that the color remained relatively intact during this last round of sanding. My plan is to do another three coats and then either do one more 800 pass followed by a final coat or just cutting directly to 1600. Once I've done the 1600 pass it will be time to use rubbing compound and a buffer to get the final finish. This last 800 pass has really got my confidence up though. The Vanagon looks like it may actually look quite nice when I finish this insanely long process. Still no pictures though so you'll just have to wait.

My biggest issue now is that the weather has finally caught up with me. It is getting pretty chilly here early in the mornings and the evenings so I've got to try a new painting strategy for this next round. I'm going to try painting in the middle of the day this weekend but I'm going to do the painting in a parking garage at my office to avoid direct sun. The biggest problem I see with this is that I just don't know how many coats I can get on in the near future. I've got to get this thing done before the temps drop too far below 50 if I want a good finish on the paint. I'm not sure how I can possibly get more than a coat or two on during the weekend since I like to wait at least 24 hours between coats. I would just do a coat a week but if I am looking at four more coats to go then that puts me towards the end of November before I finished - that is dangerously close to bad weather.

I'm also thinking that I'm going to try to get at least the sliding door body work done before the winter as well now. There is a huge dent in it with about a gallon of bondo in it. I was originally thinking that I would just replace the door but now I'm thinking I may try to actually fix it. My plan is to grind out all the Bondo, then get my buddy to weld nails to the dent, use a puller to pull the nails out, grind off the nails, apply filler, and repaint it. This would be by far my most ambitious body work to date but I'd save a pretty big chunk of change if I can do it successfully.

As far as the engine goes, I've suspected that my O2 sensor was faulty right out of the box ever since I replaced my exhaust system. The engine was smelling rich and seemed to be chugging a lot harder than it was before I replaced the exhaust. I bought a replacement sensor and installed it on the van a few nights ago. I still haven't really driven the van but just turning it on in the street and giving the engine a good workout made me think that I've fixed the issue. The engine sounds a lot smoother now and does not seem to be running as rich.

Next up with the mechanical stuff is to replace my temp 2 sensor and thermostat. The heater isn't working in the van and I believe my thermostat is stuck open. I can get hot air to blow in the summer but not the winter and I've read online that the thermostat just needs to be replaced every few years or you'll end up with a problem similar to mine. I hope to tackle this job before it gets too cold. I'm a little bit intimidated with the cooling system mostly because I really don't want to dump antifreeze all over the place. I've read online about using a shop-vac to drain the system so I suppose I should just jump in there and give it a shot. I don't know what I'm so worried about - antifreeze is a lot nicer liquid than gas and I've done plenty of work on the fuel system at this point.

I painted my front bumper and some other stuff

So I went rattle can crazy over the past few days and painted my wiper arms, door handles, and front bumper with Rustoleum Semi-Gloss Black. Who knows if the paint will last but man they look really nice right now. I sanded them all down with 220 and then used some rattle can automotive primer. After that I laid down around four coats of black taking 30 minutes between each coat. In the case of the handles I left them to dry in the sun for 48 hours, wet sanded them with 400, and then put another three coats on. I'm worried that I've lost the hot summer weather that my drying times are going to go through the roof on these painting projects - on the plus side the paint seems to be going on a lot better.

Anyway I put all of that stuff back on the van and I'm getting impressed. The paint job still needs a ton of work on the van but its starting to look good. I've got three coats of paint on the van right now and its time for more wet sanding. The side that gets direct sun has a ton of orange peel to it (funny how much direct sun will impact paint) so I need to take the time to knock it all down with some 800. This may be a bit premature but I believe that after I sand and get another three coats on I'll be ready to do a 1600 wet sand and then buff with rubbing compound to get it finished up. My expectation is that the large flat areas will look just as good as they would have if I had taken the van to be painted at a shop. The real test though will be all of the hard to reach areas and areas around the windows. You just can't do a good job if you're leaving the windows in the van. I think I'm going to have to end up rattle canning parts here and there to get decent coverage in some of the seams and what not.

Guess What I'm Doing!

Still painting...

This morning I got the third coat of paint on all of the flat panels on the bus. I still haven't reached the point where the paint is opaque but I am making progress. I've made another slight modification to my painting technique over the past few days that has helped me get even closer to a mirror like finish without using any sand paper. I purchased a second 4" roller that I leave dry and use it to pop bubbles/evenly spread paint. Now my system is to use the paint roller that has been soaking to push the paint over an entire panel. I work quickly but now that the bus is getting smooth I can't press hard or I will slide. I then stick that roller back in the paint to soak while I use my second dry roller to smooth out the paint and get rid of any bubbles. I've also noticed that the side that remains in the shade almost all day has turned out dramatically better than the side that catches the sun. From here on I will only be painting in the shade. This isn't really a problem provided I get started nice and early. I have reached the point on most of the bus where it really doesn't make sense to keep painting until I can wet sand the stuff I've done already. The build up is starting to approach bumpy so I think it is time to knock it down. I'm planning to go with 800 for this next round of sanding in the hopes that I can keep as much paint on the van as possible.

In addition I've also been painting a few trim items. I painted the rear air vents to match my front vents with the subtly textured black plastic paint and they look really nice. I also painted the door handles last night and am going to add the wiper arms either tonight or tomorrow. I need to decide what I'm going to do with my side mirrors as well. I've got some cheap replacements that I may put on there or I might just try to stick with the stock ones that I've got and paint a few bits of them. Finally, I think I'm going to do a quick rattle can job on my bumpers just to complete the newish feel.

I've still got a really long way to go on my paint job. I can't stress how much work this job is requiring. It is the kind of work that offers a lot of satisfaction but its work none the less. I am super confident that I can make the flat panels look absolutely amazing now but I am still doubtful of the harder to reach areas. I've been trying different small brushes in the hope that I can find something that offers a finish similar to the roller. It is really hard to get a smooth finish on the areas that are difficult to sand and paint. I am guessing that I will finish the main body panels long before I finish the smaller trim details.

Finally, I'm at 95% positive that I'm going to give my bus the "GoWesty black out treatment". Basically I will be painting the lower 15% of the Vanagon with truck bed liner painted gloss black. It should give a kind of rugged off-road look and will help to protect against road rash and salt. I want to do the entire undercoat but its not going to be an easy job to try to do in the street.

Once I get all this exterior painting done I'm going to turn my attention back to the interior and focus on getting the Vanagon trip ready for next Spring. Allison and I will be having our first baby next February and I want to be ready to start showing him the world in our little mobile home soon afterwards.

Site Revamp?

Now that my Vanagon is no longer the blue color you see at the top of the screen I think I'm going to have to revamp the site shortly. Maybe once I finish the paint job I'll post the pics and do a grand unveiling.

More Painting...

I developed a refinement to my painting technique that seems to be doing an amazing job. It allows me to put the paint on really thin and almost perfectly smooth. I've created virtually zero orange peel since I started using this method. What I am doing is using a good deal more mineral spirits than I was using previously. I mix the spirits with the paint in the paint tray using a paint stirrer. To mix the paint and spirits I'm using a side to side motion with the stick kept at an angle to kind of force the paint on the bottom to rise to the top where the spirits are. I never move it fast enough to generate bubbles. After that I let the roller soak until it is completely saturated. I then roll it out on the tray until there is no dripping. With my roller full of paint I target an entire panel at once and work very quickly applying pressure to the roller to push the paint side to side all over the entire panel. Once I have coverage I typically have a relatively empty paint roller and I use it to very very gently pop the bubbles in the paint working from bottom to top with vertical movements. The bubbles should pop almost instantly if you've used enough mineral spirits but the trick is to continue working the paint for a few minutes. Just use gentle motions and try to be very soft and continuous. Your goal at this point is to softly work out the orange peel while the paint is settling up. Ideally you would look at the panel from an angle where you can really see the gloss on the surface. You can literally see the orange peel setting up. That is when you need to carefully take your roller in there and knock it down. Keep doing this until the paint starts to get sticky. At that point it will basically be set up and you will have dramatically reduced the orange peel that you have to sand off later. The key is to do an entire panel at once to avoid seems, work very quickly initially to get the paint on there, and then very delicately to smooth the orange peel.

So I've Been Painting...

I've been painting for one month, five days, seven hours, fifty one minutes, and twenty three seconds. That's bad enough but the really depressing part is that I haven't even gotten one whole coat on the van. This process is TIME CONSUMING people. When the people who write up their experiences with the $50 paint job on message boards notice that several months pass between posts. This isn't because they are lazy - it is because it takes an insane amount of time. I just want to prepare the people who are considering this route that it takes a while. Now that I've made that clear here is what I've learned so far.

My first step was to sand the front of the van using 60 grit. In hindsight I think this was far too aggressive. I knew I had wavy panels but 60 is a little bit intense and requires a whole lot more sanding to get back to smooth. I then moved on to 120 grit dry. This is more reasonable but I still think it is too intense. Finally I went to 320 grit. This is a little too light for that first pass. I've read that you need to use at least 320 or lower to give the new paint something to key into but 320 is pretty slow going if you are starting with a really bad wavy job. I ended up settling on 220 to do the entire body first pass and I think it is the way to go if you are starting with a crappy paint job. If you are starting with a better job (and seriously you may want to reconsider your approach if you've got a decent job) then use something closer to 300.

Back to my story though. So after I sanded the front for the third time I decided to give body work a try. I got the best body filler I could find (which was still quite crappy Bondo brand professional filler) and decided to just give it a shot. I used the angle grinder to get down to metal on any dents I could feel or any spots of bubbling paint. I then hit up the four spots that I identified as needing work with the filler and I was surprised at how difficult it was to apply evenly before the hardener kicked in. I think either the weather made it difficult (it was hot) or I am just too inexperienced but it was a lot harder than I was expecting. After a few coats and way too much Bondo in the trash can I got some results I could live with. Once the filler dried I sanded it with 120 and then 320 until it couldn't be felt. I can't stress how important patience is with body work. In hindsight I wish I would have taken more time myself. I'll get into patience more in a bit.

With my body work sanded and ready for primer I decided to go with Rustoleum rusty metal primer. I used a 4" high density foam roller to apply it unthinned. It went on looking relatively smooth and gave me surprising coverage. Since I used nothing to cut it, I decided to give the primer almost two weeks to dry before I touched it again. When I returned to the van the primer was good and hard but horrible orange peely and down right cratered. It really didn't look so hot but I decided to forge on and start wet sanding. I wet sanded using 400 I believe. This was my first time wet sanding and I really didn't do the greatest job on it. With wet sanding you need that paper to have soaked for a full day if you want it to be easy to work with. You also need your sanding blocks pre-selected to fit in every space that you need sanded before you start working. I didn't have either and honestly didn't use enough water but I did manage to hit every square inch of the paint with sand paper.

Finally the moment I've been waiting for. Time to hit the car with the actual paint I wanted to use. I selected an almond Rustoleum professional grade oil paint and I thinned it around 15% using odorless mineral spirits. I soaked my roller just like everyone on the Internet said I should and I went to work. The second my roller hit the car I was dumbfounded by how utterly hopeless my cause appeared to become. Instead of nice lovely self-levelling paint I was greeted by a billion air bubbles and drips. I frantically ran my roller over all the bubbles hoping that everything would get better but honestly it didn't help much at all. I then remembered the advice of one online painter that the first coat will give you serious doubts as to the utility of this method and I resolved to press on. And press on I did, covering the entire front of the van in this bubbly concoction. Towards the end I was getting really sloppy and just trying to get paint on the surface. By the time I finished I was beginning to seriously doubt this whole adventure. The van looked worse than ever and I really had no idea what I was going to do about it.

After a few more hours past I decided that I could just sit there looking at this fiasco so I grabbed my roller again and decided to put on a second coat. The second time through went a little bit better. I learned more about how to work the paint to get the bubbles out and I did a much better job of applying the paint smoothly. When all was said and done I had a brutally orange peeling but single color cab. Just having a solid color of paint on my van gave me some hope and I left it to dry for a week.

This brings us to weekend before last when it was time to try to correct my bumpy van with elbow grease, sand paper, and a lot of water. Nature decided to give my wet sanding a hand and rain all day on Saturday. Undeterred, I pressed on and grabbed my trusty 400 grit wet sand paper and literally stood in the rain wet sanding all day. The surface was so riddled that it took me eight hours to wet sand the driver's, passenger's door, and front of the van. The labor involved was a bit overwhelming but I ended up with the smoothest van 400 grit paper could possibly provide. The sad part is that I ended up sanding through a ton of the work I had done. There were dozens of places where I not only sanded back down to the blue paint but made it all the way to the OG primer. I even hit metal in a couple of spots. It was during this process that I realized just how sensitive body work is. If you really want a level surface on a vehicle that has been abused for 24 years then it is going to take a whole lot of work.

The next morning I woke up and decided I'd learned enough - time to jump in with both feet and tackle the entire van. If I continued in a piece meal fashion then it would take me six or seven months of weekends to do the entire thing. I decided to dry sand the entire untouched portion of the van with 220. This was the dawn of a new strategy. My new strategy would be to make the van all one color at any cost forgetting about the body work here and there. My thinking is that if I can at least get my van looking semi-decent again I will have the patience to do the body work that is needed. This will end up creating more work for me in the long run but right now I just want my van to look semi-normal once more so I'm going to see where this strategy takes me. I did grind all of the paint bubbles just to get rid of the obvious surface rust but I didn't worry at all about dents or dings. Right now I am just painting.

This brings us up to the past weekend. I began the weekend with a "prepped" van. I say prepped in quotes because I was obviously ignoring several spots on the body that will need more work to look nice. Like I said though, the new strategy is to just get the van all one solid color. I also did some more research and gave the paint thinning and mixing process a lot more attention this time around. I used a lot more mineral spirits and put a ton of time into avoiding air bubbles introduced during the missing process. I spent probably 30 minutes just mixing up a tray of paint slowly stirring it to avoid air. Finally the time came for another coat. I decided to start with the area that I lovingly wet sanded in the rain last weekend. This time, for the first time, I finally grasped how this process is supposed to work. I soaked my roller and very carefully rolled out the excess. I then applied it very gently to the metal and quickly worked to spread out the paint. I used around 20-30% mineral spirits this time and could instantly see the paint self-level without running down the side of the van. This time there were far fewer bubbles thanks to my extended mixing session but the ones that did appear popped quickly or could be gently rolled out with my roller. For the first time I was truly seeing a very smooth finish on the van and started to believe that this insane idea just might work. Finally the van was looking like it might one day look like a normal vehicle once again!

The down side is that I was painting painfully slowly. You get paint on and then you spend a good deal of time slowly working what you've applied ever so gently trying to get a smooth mirror-like finish. It is tedious and slow but I now believe in the method. I'll do anything to avoid another marathon wet sanding session that ends up destroying most of the paint that I spent hours applying. I can already tell though that this time I'm going to be able to jump up to something like 800 grit paper and I'm going to be able to keep most of this paint intact.

This brings us to the present. My plan going forward is to apply two complete coats of paint and then wet sand using 600-800 grit wet. While wet sanding I will also be washing the car to avoid any buildup. This is important because the resulting dust will be do fine that unless washed off it will almost adhere to the surface and will hurt the smoothness. I am estimating four coats until 90% of the surface has complete coverage. Alternating one weekend of sanding followed by one weekend of two painting coats I am looking at another month of work to get to a surface that may be ready for buffing and polishing. Man this job takes a long time...

The only other detail that I've left out is that I am contemplating a paint switch for the final few layers. There is a beautiful single stage polyurethane paint designed to be rolled on boat hulls called Interlux Brightside that I may switch to. This paint is designed to be salt and UV resistant and has amazing self-levelling properties. The catch is that it is more expensive than Rustoleum and I hear that it is also softer. So I'm thinking that I'll get a solid base done with the cheaper Rustoleum paint and then top it off with the Brightside. That will give me a very hard base that I can get nice and level that I can then top off with a beautiful UV resistant paint. I haven't made up my mind about that part yet though.

Finally one last thought, if you are doing this in the street in the city then prepare yourself for almost constant humiliation. When you see this job in process it looks like the person executing it is completely and totally insane. Looking at the paint go on it doesn't look like there is any hope what so ever of it every working out well. The van looks like a complete disaster and you're sitting out there painting a car with a roller. Basically you will look like an idiot and people will constantly call you out on it. I've just taken to telling people that I am applying a primer. Seriously you will look like you have no idea what you are doing and you will draw attention to yourself. Just be ready and hope that one day it will all come together and your van will once again look like a regular vehicle. Until that day just press on while quietly chewing on your humble pie.