[EmJay]

What's the process of color/wet sanding? What grits would u recommend?

[firmbeliever]

Painting

I decided to paint the DS myself, and I thought it might be useful to share my experiences with other first time sprayers. I have painted a couple of cars before (the 2CV and a friends VW Camper), both of which came out very well, but not good enough for the DS.

I'm certainly no painting expert, I just hope to explain how I went about painting the DS and give some advice and inspiration to other beginners. I'll get some photos on here soon which should help to clear things up, if you've got any questions please email me and I'll do my best to help.

Equipment

Firstly, a word about equipment. You're going to need a few obvious things to paint a car :
A compressor
At least one spray gun
The choice of compressor is very important. You want something big enough to power a pro spraygun, and something that isn't going to be cutting in every few seconds. My compressor will supply 14cfm (10cfm FAD) of air, which is plenty for almost any air tool around. If you're looking to buy a compressor, look for 14cfm. The 8cfm ones are all right for filling tyres, but it won't power a top spraygun. A big tank is good too, so buy the biggest you can. The secondhand market is a very goodplace to get compressors; I got mine from eBay for £200; new it would have been over £600! It had been well looked after (under a service contract from Ingersoll), so I wasn't worried.

A mistake a lot of people make when painting a car for the first time is to use a cheap gun. As an experiment I painted one panel with a cheap (i.e. around £10) gun, then painted another with a pro gun (around £180). The finish from the pro gun was almost perfect, the finish from the cheap gun was crap. Basically what I'm saying is buy the best gun you can afford. Again, I picked mine up second hand; the gun I use is a DeVilbiss JGA, which is the 'industry standard' amongst pros. They are around £180 from Machine Mart in the UK but it's well worth it. Bear in mind that a pro gun will use a lot of air, so you need to make sure your compressor will keep up.

Preparation

Preparation is everything. No two ways about it, you'll spend most of your time preparing the panels. Here are the steps I took in preparing a rear wing:
Citroën Restoration - DS Restoration - Painting

Please click link for the rest of the article...

[shader]

The process uses water or a water/soap mix (to keep from running off the car) from a garden hose, spray bottle or a bucket of water and a sponge. Keep the areas wet at all times and use sanding blocks or other items to hold the sand paper. If you wet sand using your hand to hold the paper you run the chance of sanding streaks into the paint from your fingers. Sand in one direction. Waterproof sandpaper is black and costs more than regular paper. The grit depends on the paint and the color. Clear coat maximum 1000-if heavy orange peel, then work up to finer grits. Dark colors 800 grit minmum then work to finer grits. Generally, if you start with something like 400 grit it's hard to remove the sanding lines. If this is used to remove orange peel and then will color coated again, that should be OK. Final color sanding should always be done with the finest grit possible that will remove orange peel and give a smooth surface. Color sanding is not complicated, but kind of trickey, and this info is just generalities ---recommend you Google for some sites devoted to this subject.