My daughter has 1998 Acccord - 4 door. The top coat is awful and the paint is So-So. My son want to try painting it, and the way the car looks, we have nothing to lose.

I have an air compressor and my son and I do work on cars.
So I have a few questions...

1) We are thinking about going the job in phases.
a) Front fenders, bumper first (remove, paint, re-install)
b) hood and trunk ( remove, etc,..)
c) top of car ( sand this)
d) 4 doors (sand this)
e) rear bumper ( remove, etc...)

2) has anyone used Aircraft Paint remover? We are thinking about using this for the items we can remove ( bumpers, fenders, trunk, and hood). Sand the top and doors only.

3) How do you remove paint from the bumpers with it being plastic?

4) Does the aircraft paint remover damage plastic or rubber or glass? Dont know whether to use on top of car or doors. Or is it safer to just sand this section.

5) I expect to maybe spray 2 coats of primer and 2-3 coats of car paint.
What kind of paint is good? I don't want CHEAP paint, but I dont want the best either. Just something good that will last at least 5 years.

Any other advice?

 

The end result of the paint job will be from your prep work.

If this was my car, I'd probably fix current dents doing paintless dent removal techniques before stripping/sanding the paint. At least get the dents shallow, so you can use minimal bondo to fill if needed.

I'd get any part that doesn't need paint removed, so the paint stripper doesn't damage it. I'd remove the glass and any rubber. I don't know if the paint stripper will damage the plastic bumper. I'd try a little bit of the aircraft stripper on a section of the bottom edge of the bumper that faces the ground to see how the plastic reacts.

Once you prime the part, spray a guide coat and sand out any imperfections using proper sanding blocks. There is a good youtube channel called diyautoschool and also swrnc. You can watch how he preps cars for painting. He does good work, but yells, swears, and rambles when talking.

Not sure which paint brand to use. I think that paint brand may be like asking what motor oil to use. I remember he said he likes the Matrix clear coat in one of his videos.

 

I painted my own car, and it came out fine, but it's a lot of work. Something I will never do again. The car went from Black, to Blue because the clear coat was peeling. I removed the door handles, door moldings, grill, rear view mirror thingies, rocker panels, and mud guards. Everything else was taped/covered.
Good luck.

 

Nice job! What did you do to sand it down? By hand or electric sander?

 

Air powered dual action sander. It makes it as easy as it can be, but still a lot of work. I painted the car in Acrylic Enamel, and no clear coat. It can't peel off, if it's not there.

 

what is a dual action sander? I think the sander is the way I want to go, after reading about aircraft paint remover. Dual- as in rotating in an odd way? And sand paper, I am thinking of starting with 220 to remove the overcoat and top paint, but leave the original primer. is that OK ?