5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t DIY Your Car Paint Job

Sometimes, keeping up with your car maintenance feels as if you’re spending every other day at the mechanic or auto body shop. When the bills and visits start adding up, it’s tempting to start taking care of some of the maintenance yourself.

While it’s always good to know your way around your car, there are a few things that you should never do yourself, and that includes your car’s paint job. The professionals have the know-how and the right tools, including paint matching kits, to do the job right.

1. You Need to Prepare the Surface

Before you can start painting, you will need to prepare your car’s surface. Just cleaning and polishing it is not enough, you will also need to sand your car’s surface.

If you have an electric or air-powered sander at home, then sanding will go a little easier, but not many people have this specialised piece of equipment. You can always use sandpaper, but then it will take even longer. Even with an electric sander, each panel of your car could take up to two hours to prep properly.

2. You Will Waste a Lot of Time

Painting a car is not as simple as painting a shed or even your living room. It is a difficult, time-consuming process. The preparation alone could take you an entire day. You will then still have to paint multiple coats, wait for the car to dry in between each coat, and finish the paint with the right protection to ensure that the job lasts.

Adding up all of the different steps of the process, painting your car could take several days or even an entire week. If you want to paint smaller areas, such as the trunk or door sills, then your painting time will be even longer since you will have to disassemble part of your car.

Meanwhile, professionals have the experience and equipment to paint your car much faster than you would. You will also be free to go about your daily activities while they take care of your vehicle.

3. You May Not Have the Right Space for Painting

When painting your car, location is crucial. You want to have enough space to move around your vehicle freely and store all your equipment. Plus, you want proper ventilation so you’re not inhaling all the paint fumes. Unfortunately, most people’s garages are not large enough or ventilated enough for a DIY paint job.

Think you can just paint outside? Think again. You would need to thoroughly clean your driveway because any dust on the surface could damage the paint permanently during the process. Since repainting your car takes several days, you would need to hope that it doesn’t rain during this time as well. Unless you have a makeshift outdoor shelter for your car, rain, dust, or leaves could get stuck on wet paint and ruin the surface.

Auto body shops have designated paint booths that protect the car during a paint job and speeds up the process.

4. You Don’t Have the Right Paint

You will need to look into purchasing car paint from a speciality store. Paint matching is a hard task to do when you’re not a professional. You don’t want to finish painting your whole car only to realise that it is not the shade you wanted or that patches are different colours from the rest. An auto body shop has the tools to match your paint perfectly.

5. You Don’t Know How to Finish

Your job is not finished once the last layer of paint on your car dries. You would need to buff the vehicle to create a shiny finish and protect the paint. However, to do this you would need a buffer. Buffers are speciality tools that most people do not just have in their garage, so think of the money you would waste buying it just for one paint job.

Buffers are also difficult to use. One mistake and you could ruin your car’s surface and even remove some of the paint you just worked so hard to apply!

Approach the Professionals

If your car needs new paint, it is best to go to a professional auto body repair shop as they have the skills, experience and tools to ensure a quality car paint job. For peace of mind and a paint finish that will last, trust the professionals.