Actually it is a love hate relationship… I like painting my own cars. Am I good at it, well I guess I’m not bad but I doubt you’ll be seeing me on the car TV shows! So, over the years I’ve painted several cars. Typically I would use the latest and greatest paint technology, but as of late I’ve been experimenting with Lacquer. For the un-initiated, lacquer is one of the older automotive paint technologies. Lacquer started phasing out in the 60’s and 70’s for enamels and urethans. When I was younger, I heard the village elders wax-poetic about 10 coats of hand rubbed Lacquer, and being able comb your hair in the mirror reflection. So a few years back I painted a motorcycle with Lacquer, it came out well enough. I wasn’t going to use the fenders to get dressed by – but they had flatter paint and more shine than many other things I had done. And the best part was the paint was forgiving. Damage it in some way – you could simply brush paint over the problem, sand and buff to a shine. So when I had another car project – I thought lets do that in Lacquer also. The difference here is scale. The motorcycle parts I could carry around with me, work on them while sitting on the back deck or the like. But a car is much less portable. Additionally when you have so much to do – it actually becomes work…. To make it feel less like work. I try to break things us. On the first pass I got it OK looking, drove for a while, then worked on it another weekend. And so on an so forth. Now I have the details to do. The car looks great from a distance, but up close you see little scratches that have to be rubbed (sanded with high grit then buffed) out. Its time consuming, but still kinda rewarding.
The Road 