Dan, I'm not an expert, but I play one on KRnet. I've painted a few cars over the years, most recently my Scirocco, and I helped out with an Alfa Romeo last week (mostly mixing paint and pointing out placed he'd missed, and what he was doing wrong). What Brian says is true, you've got to put it on wet. Wetter than you'd think. The guy painting the Alfa was just dusting it on from 12"-16" away, and was headed for a really nasty paint job. I kept telling him to get closer and slow it down so it was wet out and gloss, but he was worried about runs. At one point he started feeling queazy from the fumes and had to step out, so I painted his hood for him while he was gone. I got about 6"-8" away and really poured it on. Of course that's a horizontal surface and you can get away with that for sure. I eventually got the teacher to come in and tell him that indeed he needed to put it on a lot thicker, and he gave him a demo. After that (and it's a good thing, because we were starting the third coat of color), he really slowed down and got closer, and it started looking fabulous. When he finished, it was one fantastic looking car, with exactly one run on one fender where he'd been way too close and too slow (he wasn't the most methodical painter I've ever seen).
Lots of light is indeed important. I'm going to build a paint booth during our next remodel job, and I already have 24 four-tube fluorscent light fixtures that I'm going to put in it (they are 277v fixtures being replaced at work, that I've modified to run on 110V). It's a whole lot easier to sand out and polish a few runs that it is to do the entire car. Err on the wet side, I'd say. Indeed, it can all be sanded out with 1200 or 2000 and rubbed out and polished, but that's a lot of work, and there's a real risk of going through the paint to the primer, especially if it's a thin job. The good news is that a lot of the planes that show up at the Gatherings are orange peeled to, but they still look great, and nobody even notices. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'd be tempted to live with it and worry about it later, maybe even a few years down the road when you've thought of a better paint scheme and need to do a few repairs anyway. Take my advice, "there's a time for building and a time for flying, and it's time to fly that thing". (maybe I heard that somewhere)... Mark Langford, Huntsville, Alabama N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
