So I figured since I had all this time to kill during winter break, I'd do some work on my car. I wanted to do a few things actually..
1) Change my low beams to HIDs. I like the road bright. I normally drive at night. The blue tint looks pretty. But mom won't let me. So I pretty much have to wait until my halogens burn out before I change them to HIDs... or just pester her some more.
2) Change my horn. My horn sounds pathetic. Bikes have more indiminating horns than my car does. So I never honk. This would be top of the list if I had a car alarm, cause the horn would sound every time I arm/disarmed. Mom thinks its a waste of money. It's such an insignificant amount of money anyways. Which brings me to....
3) Power locks. Too bad it's too expensive to install. It sure would make things a lot more convinient. Plus it's pretty much impossible to do it myself.
4) Fix my car scratches. Cheap paint means lots of scratches.
5) Install angel eyes. I don't have the balls to do this yet. The process is kinda scary. Plus, mom probably wouldn't let me.
But seeing how my mom doesn't even let me drive the car, and I do it anyways, it's kinda hard to do much.
The only thing she didn't heavly object to on that list would be the paint. Since today was a nice sunny day, I went out and bought materials.
Which is.. paint, coat, newspaper, sandpaper, sandpaper, bowl, a block of wood, and masking tape.
And I wanted to fix those scratches. Easy enough job.Well my original plan was to spray the paint into the plastic bowl, then apply the paint on with a toothpick, then sandpaper it smooth, apply more paint, sandpaper, etc. Except..
Who knew. Car paint dissolves styrofoam... and I got this stuff all over my hands. So backup plan, follow the can instructions and spray directly onto the car..
After several cycles of spray paint, hairdryering, sandpapering, spraying more paint, drying, sandpapering... the scratch marks went visible. Then I realized, the paint didn't match. I wasn't expecting a perfect match, I wanted it to be unnoticeable from about 5 feet away. It wasn't. In fact, it was a horrible color match. The touch up paint ended up being considerably darker than my car paint. Silly little booklet thingy said it would match "close enough". So I ordered the exact color Mazda paint and didn't apply the coat. When the correct color paint comes in, I'll just sandpaper off the non-matching touch up paint, and apply the correct color paint.
I did a pretty good job too, by the time I "finished" the scratch couldn't be seen and it was flat.. it's jut that the color didn't match :(
Since it was still day out, I jsut spent the rest of the afternoon washing my car...
(update as soon as the correct color paint comes in).
[update: 12/30]
Correct (hopefully) paint shipped. Should get here on Monday, sadly. So odds are, I'll finish this project first weekend I come back.. :(
[update: 1/17]
Correct paint came. It's not spray on (thank god cause that gets so messy). I bought more sandpaper, expanding my sandpaper collection to P400, P800, and P2000. I also sawed a new block of wood to use that sandpaper with (My god dull saws are hard to use).
I love paint, it has so many warning labels on them. They're fun to read.
I sandpapered off the old non-matching paint with the P400 grade sandpaper. Then I applied on the correct color paint. Yes. This time it is an exact match... "close" match paint I think I'll just apply to the area under my bumper that gets scratched by speed bumps, dips, and evil driveways or something.
Painting white paint with a little brush reminded me of the days I used to use liquid white out. They smell the same too. After 3 uneven layers of paint, it actually started to blend in.. other than the fact that it was extremely lumpy and uneven, but that's what sandpapers for.
Picture was taken in the dark in my garage because I couldn't finish before sundown. You can't even see the scratches anymore! :D (though you can see lumps of paint in the area.. ) Will continue later tonight when the paint dries enough for me to sand down.[update: after later tonight]
Well... the paint did dry up enough for me to sand down... which then required me to apply another layer of paint.. and wait for that to dry... which I sanded down some more... and applied a bit more paint.. and now I'm waiting for it to dry again. I swear this process sucks. Hopefully this will be the last layer of paint I need and hopefully I don't oversand and have to apply more paint. Whenever I sand, I keep hoping I'm not making the problem worse D:
[update: 1/18]
Well.. After the paint dried, I evened it out. Then I sprayed on a layer of clear coat.. then another layer.. then another layer. Sometime after the 2nd layer of clearcoat, I accidentally touched part of it, so there's a part of the paint that kinda looks like my fingerprint. Then I smoothed it out, so it pretty much looks like this.
If you look really really closely, you can kind of tell where my sandpaper scratches are.. and its not too hard to tell where I touched up paint... especially if you're looking right at it.
So then I just buffed out the scratches with some rubbing compound.. by hand.. so it's not perfect. But after I buffed out the scratches, it looks like this (and you probably can't even tell from photos).
Since I don't have a weeks time to redo everything until it's almost invisible, I'll just leave it alone for now. Its a good enough job that from about a yard away you can't tell.. and if you just glance by you wouldn't notice a thing. It just annoys me how I can see exactly where the scratch is, where there is more clear coat, where I didn't buff out the scratches well enough, where the clear coat is still pretty thin, and where I accidentally touched when the clear coat is drying.
Of course, then my mom wanted me to fix up her major scratches (from that car accident back before I got my license).. which kinda looks like this right now... lots more work ahead for me.
