All right, it's time for the big one - 40 rattle cans, 3 days, and by the end of it I will either have the best-looking car in my hometown, or the worst. That remains to be seen.

 

Day 1 (yesterday) I did exactly what I was not supposed to do and started by wasting paint on non-essential stuff for the engine bay and interior.

 

 

 

The cam cover and heat shield will get some purple high temp a little later on, and then a purple dressing kit should sort the engine bay out nicely.

 

Interior before:

 

Interior now:

 

 

 

If the exterior turns out half as good as that did, I'll be happy with it.

 

Finished off day 1 with cutting out some rust on the bonnet & behind the number plate on the tailgate, and ordered a set of gel plates which should come today or monday. Next up is to sand down the filler and hopefully start painting...

Day 2. Finished up the body work, and cut out some mesh for the front bumper, then took the bumpers, lights, mirrors and some other stuff of, masked the whole car up, and brought out the rattle cans.

 

 

(side note: I had to remove the tow hook as it didn't line up with the facelift bumper, and was pushing it out. I did want to just unbolt it but the bolts were more rust than metal, so I improvised with an angle grinder.)

 

Started painting and it was going quite well until I learned the hard way that the garage roof leaks.

 

 

Not wanting to take off the masking which took me about an hour to put on, I decided to try and move the car which has a stupidly huge turning circle into my unit which was a complete 90 degree turn, without a windscreen, any of my windows or mirrors. I don't know how I managed that, but I did.

 

The results

 

 

 

Lighting from the front is bad, but the paint is actually pretty even all round (except for the bonnet ofc)

 

Some more bits painted gold - mirrors etc.

 

 

Painted the GT sideskirts (got these a while ago) gold as well, and purple for the bumpers (the rear valance will be gold to match the skirts)

 

 

Pretty much everyone in the Primera club advised me not to rattle can the car. I honestly don't know why because the finish is sexy as hell

 

 

Now just the bonnet & valance to paint, throw on a couple cans of clear coat and put the car back together...

I question your choice of colour. But the workmanship is excellent, well done! 

 

When can I book my van in for a Vio respray? 

I can see it now.......

I don't know if it's the light or of the exterior paint looks like it needs more coats?

Anyway as it goes. Your styling choices have always differed greatly from what I personally like but it's actually coming on alright for a ricer primera lol. Keep it up

Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

Have you named it spyro?

Gotta say vio, you  can never be predicted

On 15/10/2016 at 16:44, kwijibo_coupe said:

I question your choice of colour. But the workmanship is excellent, well done! 

 

When can I book my van in for a Vio respray? 

 

I am *never* painting a car myself ever again  This has taken near a full week including two occasions where I didn't leave the garage for near 24 hours and opted for either almost overdosing on toffee lattes or taking naps on the 6n seats in the corner of the garage between coats. Not to mention that on top of the cost of paint, additional paint, more paint, painting supplies and an unhealthy amount of Mcdonalds and Dominos, the whole thing probably cost around £500 in total. Next time I'll just fork out for a professional respray.

 

On 17/10/2016 at 20:09, wizardmanjm said:

I don't know if it's the light or of the exterior paint looks like it needs more coats?

Anyway as it goes. Your styling choices have always differed greatly from what I personally like but it's actually coming on alright for a ricer primera lol. Keep it up

Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

 

I was never into cars as a kid - it was only after I got Dora when I was 20 did I realise how awesome these things are, and that I had a *lot* of catching up to do. So at the moment my styling choices are roughly equivalent to those of a 13 year old boy who's just binge watched all the Fast and Furious films - but unfortunately I am actually 23 and I have cars and disposable income. Not good

 

And yeah I decided the first 3 coats were way too light and I still had ~10 cans of purple left, so I added another 2 moderately heavy coats. Then the bonnet, door handles and valance got the gold paint, and I got a few more coats on the side skirts as well.

 

 

Fitted up the door handles, mirrors, skirts and bumpers (and added the mesh to the front) to get a rough idea of what the final product will look like:

 

 

(I did want the window rubbers gold as well but 1) they're a bitch to mask around and 2) I'm out of paint. At a later date I'll take em off and spray em seperately) So last thing to do last week was 4 good layers of clearcoat (with 9 cans)

 

 

Oh, and I took the opportunity to replace the pink LED strips with some purple ones which are a lot closer to the colour of the car. My phone camera doesn't do them justice, but nonetheless...

 

 

 

Edited 21 October, 20169 yr by Vio

Put the lights back in and picked up a set of gel plates

 

 

I still have yet to wet sand and buff the clear coat (which will make it 10x better as a dull gold doesn't really work), but the results so far

 

i know you dont like advice from others and will do it anyway , but rattle can clear is very thin and will burn through very easily , take extreme car buffing that with a machine

On an unrelated note, I bought Dora an alternator, which in theory is all she needs to get on the road again - only I can never bring myself to go to the garage because it's too bloody cold. And I'm having too much fun with this Nissan. But hopefully once the weather improves, I might actually have a Polo to discuss with Club Polo.

 

Until then, however

 

 

Merry Christmas to me~~

 

 

So I somehow got ahold of a modified facelift spoiler (with the middle pillar removed so it'll fit my bootlid). I did want something bigger but I figure I'd best stick to OEM stuff in case my insurance company catches me with an undeclared Type R wing or something. It'll be painted gold when I get some time off work and get Neko back in the garage - I still have yet to buff the clearcoat, and there are a few paint chips which need attending to. In summary, the rattle-can respray has held up about as well as you would expect.

 

My wiper motors were also dying, so I ordered new ones. The front one came fine, the back one came like this

 

 

WHY THE FFFFFFFFF

 

And added a few other goodies - electric mirrors (not the wiring, just the mirrors. So they don't actually work as yet), a new wiper stalk for adjustable intermittent, fixed a rear seatbelt, and purple fuzzy dice (ok that was from work's secret santa, I was obliged to make use of them)

 

And then I ordered a set of GT grills... back in November. 5 weeks later and they hadn't turned up. Some unpleasant stuff happened, and eventually the guy delivered them to me personally (they need paint as well before I can fit em), and was also kind enough to sell me a full set of GtLe full leather seats (probably the rarest and most desirable seats for the car)... for £50. You even don't need to know anything about Primeras to know that's a dream come true.

 

 

 

There's not much in life that's better than a car with full leather seats.

Edited 10 January, 20179 yr by Vio

7 hours ago, Vio said:

I might actually have a Polo to discuss with Club Polo.

 

 

What is this now???

lies, vio is clearly a spy trying to break up the vw community