hey guys i am going to have to repaint my car this spring...i put it in a ditch and messed up the front bumper, and front quarter panels, and back bumper...well anyways, it is currently the factory polo dark metalic green color, and my dad has experience painting cars, but he has never changed colors, i was wondering how big of a PITA it is to change the color... and what you do about under the hood in the enginge area? well give me your opinions and ideas, if its not worth it, i will just go ahead and repaint the same color thanks guys!

 

It will be a MAJOR pain. You'll have to do the engine may, the door jams, the inside of the hatch.... the list goes on. It's usually not worth it unless you were planning on tearing the car apart for some other project.

 

I am going to be doing something similar in the spring. One thing I learned from a board member though is that it is harder to do a metallic color, especially a color change with a metallic color.

I would remove all of the removable body panels if you are planning to do a color change. Then paint everything seperately. However, if you go with a different metallic color, this will be kinda hard to do, because you need to paint eeverything at once.

I would do it in two stages, paint all the studd you can't see first, like door jams, hatch jam, and the inside half of the door and hatch. Then you have to paint all of the outside at the same time, otherwise with a metallic color, it will not work right. Good luck

 

what color are you going to do? I would just leave the insides green and paint it whatever color you want, who cares about the door jambs, nobody really sees it.

 

Yeah. no oen except anyone that gets in the car, or someone who may want to buy it later. Why would someone be so dumb as to half as$ a car?

 

Paint the jams and under the hood. It's not that big a deal to do, just takes time (taping everything off). No need to remove the engine or anything, you can tape it off and spray around it.

DEFINETLY change the color. You'll hate your self later if you spend all this money and time just to get a stock car.

I say paint it a non-factory color.

Millenium Yellow (check out Brent94Z)
Electron Blue (see my avatar)
or a Charcoal Gray (like on the newer Lexus)

It just takes a little more time to tape it all off, it's NOT a major PITA if you aren't lazy.

 

i'm in the middle of a color change as we speak guys.

i had a bright red TA GT with black rims and now its artic white with a electron blue stripe down the center with matching white rims and another set of matching blue rims (like 30th TA) .....blue accents such as the grills on my ram air hood and badging and emblems, brake calipers are also blue. the engine has a (powdercoated everything)white intake manifold with blue fins, white VC's.

i did the engine bay with a can of spray paint, everything else is at the shop. my friend and i are doing the change ourselves and so far we have both doors, hood, GFX and the eye lids painted and buffed to a great shine. i'm using a single stange PPG paint, that means no clear coat.... kinda expensive but looks just as good and its faster.

easy as pie if you have the time..........

 

Depending on what color you want to go with, it is possible to get away with NOT doing the engine bay. IMO to do the engine bay properly, you pretty much have to pull the engine. I didn't want to do that when I did mine and because my car was previously black and I was switching to yellow, I thought it would actually look kinda cool to have a black engine compartment so things worked out well

Take a look here for how far apart you should take the car to change the color. On mine, the only thing that was not removed were the little black triangles behind the door glass because the body/paint guys didn't think they could get them off without breaking something

http://www.bfranker.badz28.com/fbody/ssrepaint.htm

 

yea, if your car was black to begin with, then it wuldnt look too awkward to have the engine bay black and the color yellow, like brents, because i see early muscle cars with a black bay on like a red car. But then you got stuff like a guy at work with his 1996 trans am. it looks NBM, but was teal before as seen inside the door hinge area and engine bay

 

that is "exactly" how Berger Chevrolet does it.....

they start off with all black cars!

 

but my car is green. i was thinking electron blue, but i havnet saw any pictures of cars this color, and i think i want something a little darker...