A few details about how this "driveway" paint job happened:
The original intent was to prepare the car, including the primer / sealer step in my driveway and then haul the car by flatbed truck to a friend's body shop that had previously given us permission to use his paint booth over a weekend.
The body shop owner forgot about it and took off deep sea fishing in the Gulf on the day we were supposed to go in the paint booth!
We were locked out with no way to get the keys to the shop.
The guy in most of the photos is Billy Kidd, (yep, that's his real name).
Billy owns and runs "Tricked Out Customs" in Tampa and paints custom bikes and cars as well as making money between custom jobs doing some occasional bumper and paint repairs "on location" for car dealers and private owners. Billy has a good bit of experience painting outdoors.
Instead of waiting for another available weekend to get the paintbooth, Billy suggested that we just paint my car right there in my driveway.
Of course I was VERY reluctant to do that, but Billy assured me that it would be OK and even IF something didn't go right he would do the car over completely at his expense.
Nervous doesn't even begin to describe how I felt at that point.
After seeing the results, I honestly don't think that the paint would have been much better if we had done it in the paintbooth.
When I tell people at car shows that it was painted in my driveway they refuse to believe it.
I can still hardly believe it myself now and I was there.
My neighbor on one side did come over to complain about "over spray" claiming that he had "yellow paint" all over his car.
When we pointed out to him that we had just started shooting *white* primer a couple of minutes earlier and that everyone's car in the neighborhood had yellow dust on them from *pollen* in the air earlier that week, he laughed and apologized profusely.
I then talked with all my neighbors and assured them that I would personally wash their cars or pay for car washes if they had any paint dust on them, but that they shouldn't have a problem as we had virtually no breeze that day and we were shooting with HVLP and trying to be very careful.
I have very good neighbors, and I didn't have to wash any cars....
I was a little concerned about code enforcement or the law stopping us until Billy assured me that the code in our area only applies to commercial shops and that you are legally free to paint a car outdoors as long as we weren't getting complaints from neighbors about over spray or smell, and even then I would only be liable for any damage done to other property and we knew that wouldn't be an issue. A county Sheriff's deputy even came by at one point during the day and stopped, *only* to look at the car and tell us how great it was looking!!
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 07-18-2009).]
