How to repair and paint a bumper in your drive way.

First, you've got to run your car into something. There's really no point in fixing it otherwise.

We're fixing two gouges in the middle of the back bumper of an '05 Rolls Royce Phantom

Make sure you can get paint before you sand anything. Take the color code to your paint store, or make it on the spot like I do after a BIG investment.

The first step is to sand the damage down with 180 grit, either by hand or sander. If the damage was worse I might go after it with 80 grit. The indention below disappeared, the two gouges remain, but are softened, and now I have a surface that the filler can stick to. Spread some SEM problem bumper repair over the gouges to fill them, leaving it a little high for sanding.

The filler is carefully sanded with 180 grit to level it, then 320 grit to hide the sand scratches. Ever see a paint job and in certain light you can see sanding scratches? After the repair, the paint and primer continued to bleed off solvents, shrank, and exposed the repair through that expensive shiny paint. On a metal panel, since I don't let primer cure overnight, I'll sand the filler with 500 grit before primer to hide this. When is it done? You can't feel it with your fingers and the edges are soft, fading into the plastic.

Masked for primer, scotch brite all the shine off the remaining paint so the primer can adhere. Notice the feathering around the black plastic, the grey factory primer and the white color. On the flats, there should be a smooth and even transition between layers or you'll see an edge when it's done. on the curves of the body line you can leave the feathering more hard, the bodyline will hide it.

Always wipe down with wax and grease remover before spraying anything. The oil from a finger print can cause a delamination some day. Hey ladies, look, I'm not married! Actually I once had a ring scratch the surface through a rag so I don't wear jewelry at work. Also, I recommend KC-10 House of Kolor Wax and Grease Remover. Although I spray Standox color, Transtar Primer and Dupont Clear Coat, the House of Kolor prep solvent is the best I've used.

I really like the Transtar 2 in 1 Primer in a rattle can. Two medium wet coats and I've never had a reaction. Some people like Dupont QuickPrime, but it pinholes a lot on me. Pinholes can come from bubbles in the filler material that you sand into and leaves a small hole or from the solvents escaping from a primer when you don't let it flash completely between coats. Who's got time to wait for drying paint? You ever stand there and watch paint dry? It's as exciting as growing potatoes. See the shine on this primer? It's still wet, don't put another coat on till the shine goes away, or "flashes" like we professional "better than you" painters like to say. If you do get some pinholes, spray some primer on the end of a matchstick or make a puddle in your cap (your paint cap, not your hat!) and apply with a brush a small amount over the top of the hole and it should go away. some people squeegee puddy over their pinholes. I'm not good enough to do that yet.

So the primer has cured, masking tape removed and sanded down to 600 grit, being careful not to dig into the repair with the sander. If I could still see the repair before sanding, I would have blocked it with 220 to flatten it out before sanding down to 600. Many painters sand down to 400 or 500 before color, I don't want any sand scratches to show through the paint so I take a little extra care and go to 600 grit. My amplifier goes to eleven, by the way. See how choppy some of the feathering on the edges is? Gotta feather it gently to make it disappear.

Gram scale      $300

Paint shaker      $400

Paint software   $600

Destroying all of them with sloppy paint mixing......Priceless.

Recon uses Standox basecoats only. Their paint documentation, quality, matching and coverage is the best. If I use another manufacturer, some colors won't look right, I'll have to apply more coats, and I'll either have to use microfiche paint retrieval systems or have a laptop connected to the internet. Standox costs more, and my work is worth it. I'm not that great a painter, but my stuff looks better than 90% of the paintwork I see out there, including that produced from a paint booth. Look at the hole I fixed in the Corvette quarter panel under Quotes.

Now I skipp a couple of pictures before my server crashes. You can see the primer was feathered a little more before color. I scotch brited the entire bumper to the edge for adhesion of the color and clear coats. I prepped with KC-10. I wiped it down with a tack cloth (I like Crystal, but my paint store only carries Detro) and sprayed several fuzz coats over the primer only. A fuzz coat lays color down, but it's never wet to avoid a reaction, the solvents in the color reactivating either the primer or the original paint. Spray a wet coat of color over someone else's paint work and the whole thing will crinkle up. Hey, that might be a cool effect, someone should come up with that one. Any way, the fuzz coats go over until I can't see primer any more, then a medium wet coat for evenness of color, then some blending around the edges, which is just a fuzz coat to transition between the repaired area and the existing paint. This gets trick with metallics, sometimes you add another 50% of reducer to the paint to make it look better and prevent a halo effect around your painted area.

So here's the finished product. Perfect color, perfect repair, perfect blending of the clear just to the outside of the outside backup sensors. Blending clear is tough, it would take a book for me to explain it, so clear coat the entire panel on your stuff till someone teaches you how to do it. Spraying out doors puts some paint and bugs into the clear coat. Why do bugs want to mate with my fresh paint? Anyway, I came back the next day and sanded with 1500 grit and water then polished and glazed the whole bumper. Client's happy, I'm happy, you know how to paint a bumper and I've got $250 to go spend on more paint and sandpaper. Go to the paint store, you'll see I'm not so much kidding about that. And thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this, I'm flattered. Call me if you want me to help you fix your bumper that you messed up trying to paint. Want to learn how to do 3-4 of these a day and make six figures a year? check Reconpartner.com