If someone can contact me I’d like to get involved with the auto committee.
I’ve got some spray guns, maybe a compressor, and knowledge I want to share with group.
After seeing the 240 I feel the dms lemons car could use a mirror finish. Let’s make it happen!
Unfortunately due to regulatory and health and safety reasons I don’t think we can use any spray guns at the space. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in on the exact rules. We do have a small paint room for aerosols that is in need of some TLC if you would be interested in helping improve that area.
The amount of ventilation you need to do large painting like that indoors is well and above beyond what we can reasonably expect in the space we have. Maybe if we had a full shop area dedicated to automotive work, with its own dedicated funding, we could pull it off, but not at the current makerspace we can’t.
It’s not even really an expense thing, so much as a space thing. That and Health & Safety regs.
I’ll take a look at the area tonight and see what needs improving. I’m down to put in the work with aerosol if anyone can help. We can still get some amazing results.
Last paint booth I purchased was $3000 but it cost $5000 for the fire surpression system. The paint room would require a fire surpression too and most likely doesn’t meet the requirements to be a paint room.
This is the setup I used to paint my 240SX last October.
In hindsight, we should have come up with a better design for the sidewalls than duck tape-secured plastic sheeting. I’m still considering riveting button clasps into the roof panel and some tarps to make a better set of walls.
While it was all up, it did great keeping overspray in and dirt out. Since we were working with a gun, the paint was dry by the time it hit the ground, so cleanup wasn’t a problem. Aerosols don’t always have this advantage, though keeping the floor from getting painted is easy with sheeting.
With that said, even with the ventilation we could get from having it outside, it still filled up with a mist of particulate, which may or may not have been highly flammable. We wore respirators all day.
This would not be appropriate indoors without a significant ventilation system, and likely fire suppression to keep the regulators happy. (Warren G doesn’t like it when you have volatile mist everywhere)
You really don’t need that much room.
That link is broken.
Try Now I changed the permissions
Ah yes, I see.
Yes, for general painting like that, you can get away with a surprisingly small space. Painting a whole car, though, I think the smallest you could reasonably get away with is about a 20’x10’ area. We painted my 240SX in 26’x12’ and it was just the right size to pull the bumpers and paint them off the car, with just enough room to move around everything. Of course, at the size of that booth, we could reasonably cram a crew-cab pickup truck in and have just enough room.
(On that note, if anybody knows anyone who needs paint work done, I know a guy)
Factor in the cost of good paint (I spent $280 on black paint and clear coat) and you get out of LeMons budget range pretty quickly. I’d say pass on this project.
Michael,
I think repainting a door panel in the paint room would be an excellent idea. I’ve always wanted to know how to do auto body painting (and not the rattle-can type) the right way. I assume that painting a small item is just like painting a large item in terms of technique?
— Zach
It’s similar, but painting individual parts separately creates a need for paint-matching, which is still usually best done with the car assembled. I mean, unless you want your paint to look janky.
Or you can do it LIKE A BOSS
Willkommen Aus 1995!
That color-scheme screams Google to me. That’s neither a good or bad thing in itself, but I wonder if it was intentional or just a side effect of using primary colors (+green).
Or their father owned a wrecking yard and let him piece together a car from parts. 
On the serious, that’s a Harlequin Edition Golf, of which something like 250 were made in 1996 for auto show purposes. They’re all different colors, based on avoiding matching panel colors with the base car’s color.
Since the Harlequins were produced in 1996, and google.com was not registered until 1997, this would suggest, perhaps, the influence was the other way round…
“Harlequin Edition”. That is awesome XD
