An appropriate time to post this blog update - I plastidipped my car NiO Green. I got real crazy a few years ago during DYC.com's Black Friday sale (thinking I'd slam this SLC together and needed paint soon!) and bought a bunch of plastidip. The stuff intrigues me and I think it's a good solution if you want to hold off on actually painting your car till the body is fully seasoned. I know I did a lot of amateur hack job mods to the body and with time I'm sure cracks will show. So I'd hate to invest the money into a nice paint job now only to have to blend or re-paint a year from now. Plus this gives me the opportunity to try out a few different colors before I have to make up my mind. I had originally wanted to go one direction with color choice but after having been through this build I've had a change of heart - I think.
Anyway, the stuff is pretty easy to use. My first plastidip job is OK, but there are obvious flaws. With practice I'm sure the quality of the work will improve - this was literally my first time touching an HVLP gun. Bob was there to give me pointers but all the mistakes were mine - and there were plenty!
Here's me awkwardly spraying the black base coat:
On the very first coat I screwed up. I got some real heavy runs going that were sure to be obvious. We stopped and let things dry out then hit it with Naptha to dissolve some of the errant dip.
It looked ... ugly ... !
The good news is after another coat or two of the base coat this issue was completely invisible. Phew!
After laying down 4 base coats of black I put down 5 coats of NiO Green. I had some clogging issues with the gun during this portion of the spraying and I believe it led to the creation of a bunch of "nibs" of dip, kind of like little boogers. I had to stop halfway through the 5 coats, sand them down, then spray again. As with the black base coat, the sanded areas went away with another layer of green. This plastidip can be really forgiving! Unfortunately I didn't sand away all the boogers and find I've got a few small areas that are snotty.
I followed up on the green with 2 coats of DYC's DipPearl topcoat.
I don't have my DSLR handy so it's just a few crappy iPhone photos for now.
As Alex points out - there's a good bit of orange peel. On my test samples I got a really glossy reflective finish - with the final job it's a lot more satin than what I'd gotten before. I suspect it may be due to not enough time between spraying the last green coat and the top coat. When I sprayed my samples it was SUPER hot and everything dried very quickly. It was less hot when I sprayed the entire car. When you mix dip with top coat 50/50 you get a satin/matte finish - pretty similar to what I ended up with, though it's more toward glossy than it is matte.
If you believe the marketing, DYC's latest "Performance series" is supposed to spray a lot better and have less orange peel. You can step up to their Autoflex line which has very little orange peel, almost paint-like from what I've heard.
I've learned a TON doing this first dip job and I'm looking forward to trying it out again. As with so many things, it's all in the prep. Getting the masking setup correctly and well will produce a much nicer job (duh). Now that I know how the product behaves I'll be better prepared for the next dip.
One huge word of caution - the DipPearl topcoat generates a lot more overspray than the colored plastidip. The topcoat also has some wicked solvent-like abilities and WILL damage any paint/clear coated surface it touches. So if you've mixing it up as I've done, be sure to mask very well - I suffered some clear coat damage but luckily it was in an area that's covered up once the windows are installed.
As always, more discussion and photos on my blog:
55. Plastidip