Second Part of 1999
Well, the spraying of the car didn't go as planned. That's actually an understatement. After spraying the car with sealer, two base (colour) coats, and one coat of clear, we were going to lay down the two silver stripes on the hood. After examining the car, we decided that there was too much dirt in the paint. No problem, it should just wet sand out. So, we attacked it with 600 grit paper. It was going well until a nasty piece of dirt wasn't flattening out as planned, and I went right through the one coat of clear, and through to the base coat.
Why not just rebase that one area that was burnt through? A couple of reasons. #1 it was in a bad spot right on the hood. It was on the passenger side between the top of the fender and the raised cowl part of the hood. #2 was because of the large amounts of pearl and metallic in the paint, we weren't guaranteed of matching the existing base coat. So, we opted to re-base the entire car. I wet sanded it more with 600 grit to get it ready for the new base coat.
Before the car got resprayed, we did an extra careful job cleaning the booth. We even installed new booth filters. We figured this was the main problem with the dirt. After laying two new coats of base down, we laid down some silver stripes on the sides of the raised section of the hood. I haven't seen them done exactly like this before, so I thought I'd give it a shot. They turned out great. They make the hood look way bigger.
Two days after it was sprayed, I started wetsanding. It sure feels weird to be sanding a freshly painted car! I used 1500 on the few pieces of dirt, then 2000 over the rest of the big panels. I didn't go crazy and make the paint "show car flat", I just took the "fuzz" off. After that, it was polishing time. After a solid day of polishing, it looked great. However, as the paint cured more, a lot of wet sanding scratches "surfaced". Time for more polishing. This time it took a lot longer because the paint was a lot harder. I probably spent another 20 hours polishing it a second time.
The above two pictures are without the rear GT wing. Check back here for the pictures of it with the wing and after I use some swirl remover on it.