If ever there was a job I hated during the build of my datsun 510, it would have to have been every single part of the painting process. I'm just not someone who likes so spend hours on end sanding and stuffing around trying to get things right. I like bolting stuff together(engines, suspension anything other than painting).

But it was one of those things that had to be done, mainly because I couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it. Having done it now i'm glad I did tho. It was a very interesting learning experience.

The first thing I did was to strip the whole shell back to bare metal. This wasn't such a bad job except of course if you got the paint stripper on your skin (wear GLOVES!!!).

As I mentioned, I used paint stripper to strip the existing paint off along with steel wool and some paint scrapers. The paint stripper bubbles up the paint after a couple of minutes and depending on what's under the paint (ie bog or a thousand layers of old paint), the paint just comes straight off back to bare metal with little effort.

After removing all the paint I discovered quite a few rust spots and a hell of alot of bog from previous accidents.

So now came the wonderful task of bogging up the panels and removing rust. The main rust spots were both lower rear quarter panels, passenger side sill and the tops of both sides of the boot.

I cut out all the rust and re-welded in basically whatever I had available in the garage :)

The rust in the boot area was another matter tho, I had to cut some pieces from a shell at the local wreckers and weld them back in. This was alot harder than I thought it would be. You see metal loves to bend out of shape once you cut pieces off it and when you add a bit of heat to the mix it goes everywhere! Nothing a bit of bog didn't fix tho.

Below you can see from the pics, the welding and bog areas in the panels.

NOTE - if you are going to do this remember that heat makes metal warp and bend. So do it extremely slowly.

As I've mentioned earlier, I used acrylic to paint my car and am quite happy with the results. Although when I first painted the car I almost chucked it in and felt like cutting the poor little datto into pieces. I chose a blue that is similar to that found on the VK Brock Commodores. I absolutely love that color.

Why? Well, if you've never spray painted before (me) then painting flat surfaces such as the roof is very difficult to get right. I had alot of overspray and the roof of my datto looked very much like very corse sandpaper when I had finished. But the beauty of acrylic is that if you've added enough paint you can use wet and dry to sand it back and get a great finish.

Luckily I had used an absolute shitload of paint during the spray painting process and was able to bring the car back to a decent finish. It's not a professional job but i'm happy with it for a first time job!

See pics below

If you are going to spray paint your car/datto yourself then I have a couple of tips from my own experience.

Make sure you clean every nook and cranny in the area you are going to be spray painting. This is VERY important if you don't want to have to pick little pieces of shit out of the paint. If you have to spray paint in a dirty environment then i suggest wetting down the floor to minimise dust particles.

Make sure the area is well ventilated - those paint fumes can be very nast indeed! I found when I setup a mini tent to paint my engine bay (see pics below) fumes were a killer!

Make sure you are able to walk around the entire car comfortably with spray gun and hose attached. You don't want to try and spray paint in a cramped area - makes the paint job look like shit and very uneven.

If you're using acrylics such as I did - get a small heater and leave it in the room/area on full balst after you finish paintint. I found that the paint / faults in my spray painting sunk back alot!

Make sure your prep work is 100% finished before you start painting. Ie all dust is removed using prepsol.

Little explanation of the above. I hung plastic all around the engine bay in an attempt to reduce the problems of dust getting on my fresh new paint. But what i stupidly didn't realise was that this just compounded the problem of inhaling fumes. The paint came out quite well for the engine bay but and this is a big but it was a damn stupid idea!

Hard to manouvere around and I was high as a kite after finishing the paint work in the engine bay.