More painting.

For some reason I imagined painting the duco of the bus being one of the last things we would be doing. Turns out it is happening right now!

This is an extremely big job.

Even though we have been lucky and the bus is rust free (excepting a few patches of surface rust) there is still lots of work to do to prepare and paint it.
There aren't any big 'dings' to patch or pop back into shape and the existing paint is in pretty good condition. Sanding the bus is still a necessity to make the new paint stick properly and that has taken days of work.
The air sanders that we have purchased don't seem to heat up and stress like regular power tools so they have endured longer working times.

We opted for acrylic lacquer paint. The end result will be softer than enamel but it is much easier to lay down and you get a better result. Also, the colours we want are shelf-standard colours at Supercheap Auto which makes it MUCH easier... no mixing anything special.

First we sanded and treated any rust we could see.
Filled small nicks and dings (we have not done this perfectly but it is still looking better than leaving it).
Sanded and tidied up stickers, bubbles and chips in the existing duco and sanded the whole bus with a 200 grit sandpaper to 'rough it up'. Then we used a finer paper to get rid of the deep sand-marks.
We washed the dust off and cleaned any greasy stuff off.
We masked sections and undercoated with about 6 coats of regular grey primer.
Sanded with very fine sandpaper, washed.
Masked and painted about 6 coats of white topcoat.
(We did take off a few bits so we didn't have to mask it all).

Photos of the progress so far:

Roof sanded and ready to spray with undercoat.

All undercoated! 

Roof undercoat from the back.

...And from the top.

 

 

Colour going on.

 

 From the back.

 

 

Just the roof done. The paint colour is 'brilliant white' and it sure is whiter than the original dirty duco!

 



Now to undercoat the sides.

 



 

Here you can see how we took some parts off, sanded off the peeling stickers and masked all the rest.

 

For spray painting lessons we hit YouTube. It is amazing how much you can learn off the internet if you can filter out all of the misguided and crazy stuff!