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I have looked at the manual on painting. How many of you painted your own vehicle ? How did it turn out? Tips? What parts should be removed for individual painting? Do you now wish you had taken it to a professional?
I am considering doing this. I will take my 725 to a professional to have holes filled. Just trying to gauge how hard this is.
The military paint is amazingly easy to apply. If you are starting from scratch. I would suggest two things:
Don't paint desert tan! That stuff is just about impossible to shoot without making runs. You can't see where the wet paint ends and the dry paint begins so too much gets sprayed on the wet and causes runs.
Get a HVLP gun but instead of the normal gravity feed that has up to a few pounds of paint in your hand. Get one of the pressurized pot kind that lets you mix up to a gallon or so and then has a hose feeding a gun that is very light and easy to hold without killing your arms and shoulders.
Thanks for the info. I was planning on going od green. I do have an HLVP that I use for painting apartments.
There is someone on ebay that advertises the paint. It has the same color numbers as what is in the manual. Where did you get your paint? I would love to hear how others handled this.
When the fire dept. painted my, they went over all the rubber, I guess, I just painting it to a different color.
Here is one seller on eBay: (Not me and I have no affiliation)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Paint-Olive...gAAOxyA4ZROP00
And here is where I got my paint from:
http://www.rapcoparts.com/padenew.html
http://www.rapcoparts.com/24seoldrprus.html
I have painted all my vehicles myself and like Barmann said, the Gilesspie paint available from several of the MV vendors is very easy to work with. It is a single stage enamel and very easy to mix and spray. When I painted my M715 way back in 2004, I was lucky and had a buddy who owned a paint shop and would let me use the paint booth after hours as long as they didn't have a customers vehicle that needed to be in there and as long as I was out be open of the next business day.
https://i.imgur.com/5VvUjQI.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/gs7Xo7I.jpg
Now at the time I had completely disassembled my M715 for restoration and was painting it as individual pieces as they came back from the media blaster. I would go pick up the piece or several and bring them to the paint shop where I would finish prep and paint them and then take them home to be assembled on the vehicle. I had it all planned out the order that parts would be finished so that they could be paint and assembled in order that I needed. Soon after my buddy sold his shop so when it came time to paint my M35a2, I did it in a make shift paint booth in my warehouse. When painting the deuce I just removed a lot of the large easy to remove parts and those that I was planning on replacing anyway.
https://i.imgur.com/icb1lEV.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/EKJ4Ydf.jpg
A few years later when I did the M37 I used my same make shift paint booth in my warehouse again. Once again taking off some of the larger items to paint like the hood and taking out all the glass. Luckily the M37 was in great shape and did not need a muck in the way of parts or body work, so it was a fairly easy repaint.
https://i.imgur.com/WUMhFub.jpg
You can see that I lined the floor in plastic tarps and hung a few on the side walls to cut down on any overspray. I used a couple of old box fans under the garage door to ventilate.
By the time I got to my M725 I didn't have the open space in the warehouse to set up a make shift paint booth again, so I did it old school right there in my side yard. Luckily the ambulance was just a simple repaint as it was still all original when I got it. I removed all the glass to make it simple and masked off the things that I didn't want to get paint on and had at it. the hardest part was painting the roof. That's a big flat area that's about 7' off the ground. So painting from a ladder was required and the hardest thing was to not drag your hoses across the fresh paint while you reached out to a new area.
https://i.imgur.com/cF6UZwU.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/1iqZvB4.jpg
The best thing to remember is that military vehicles never had perfect paint, even from the factories, so there is no need to sweat over the smallest details unless you are doing a full 100 point restoration. Have fun and follow the mix directions and you should have no problems painting one. To save on shipping and fees, pick the vendor closest to you, which looks like it would be Army Jeep Parts in PA., they carry the full line of Gilesspie colors and also have it in touch up spray cans. The other major paint supplier is Rapco out of Texas. As for rubber parts that have been painted over, I have found that over coating them in a satin black helps give them a good look again.
LOL, that right there. Mine still has the military paint job and has runs all over it like the painter had a quota.Quote:
Originally Posted by Beast
Paint and welds... precision and appearance were not a priority.