How much paint?, Painting our F Prod 914 this week! Options

[Jake Raby]

Len and gang are finally ready to cart the 914 up to my place for it's bath of intense blue pearlcoat and I have no idea how much paint I'll need..

I have always sprayed Bugs and Buses and even did a 911 once but have never shot a 914 race car before...

Of course the car has no "roof" and I'll need to shoot the entire car inside and out. We plan on spraying the fender wells and under side with chassis black so I won't need paint for them.

We will be shooting color inside the cockpit, and inside the front and rear trunks as well as the engine bay. The was media blasted so every inch of it needs paint but I have no idea how much color I should have mixed???

Anybody have a clue?? I figure it'll take a full gallon but thats just an estimate!

Any help appreciated... Wait till you see this bad boy- Len has done one hell of a job on the suspension, and cage. Hell he even made his own steering wheel and seat!

[swood]

Probably 5-6 quarts for what your doing.

[Jake Raby]

Cool..
I was thinking 1.5 gallons would certainly do it and give me a tad for touch up later when Len's aggressions start to come unglued on the track :-)

[URY914]

I would think a gallon and half would be plenty. Running out of paint sucks when you're doing a project.

[Rusty]

Like any paint job, depends on what you have to cover. Dark paint over light sealer takes more pigment to cover.

If it was my project, I'd do it in two stages. First... paint the interior, trunks, and undercarriage. No matter how much you clean, you're going to have some debris from blasting come loose. You don't want that crap on your exterior. A grain of sand in a fenderwell doesn't matter much.

Then, mask off your car to do the top side. Plan on 3-4 quarts to do the top side. Have more paint mixed, and stir it all together with your leftover to ensure uniformity on your exterior panels.

[Jake Raby]

Yep, I was going to do the underside first as well as the fender wells. The car is on a rotisserie-so that makes it very easy to get to everything..

[Brett W]

If it is a special mettalic color you should buy extra so that it will be from the same batch when you go back and re-spray it. It will make color matching a lot easier. The last 914 I did took almost a full four quarts of color and a gallon of clear. So buy accordingly. Paint adds weight so take that into account.

[sww914]

An HVLP spraygun saves a lot of paint. I sprayed a 4 door lexus with 2 1/2 quarts of basecoat and 3 quarts of clear (unmixed), it was white so it covered really easily. Exterior only, no jambs or anything. Mixed it was about 3 3/4 quarts of base and 4 1/2 quarts of clear.
I bought 3 quarts of green and 2 quarts of blue for my racecar and I still have some (almost a quart) of each color. I painted most of the exterior, the engine compartment, the interior and the cage green, and most of the back blue.
I haven't painted many completes the last 10 years, but a gallon used to cover the exterior of almost anything except for some metallics, red, for instance, barely covers, golds can be really transparent too.