Painting day finally arrived! I cleaned up all of the parts with isopropyl alcohol and laid as many out on my spray table as would fit. The paint is a waterborne paint like the primer I've been using is, but it requires a catalyst and water to be mixed in. The difficult part is knowing how much paint to mix, so by the end of the day I ended up mixing up four batches.
I don't have any pictures of the painting process for all of the interior parts. It was a lot of back and forth between cleaning, setting up and spraying. I've heard that the Stewart Ekocrylic is really hard to lay down nicely, and after today, I definitely agree. Whereas most solvent based paints are known to flow pretty nice and lay down smoothly, for whatever reason the waterborne stuff has a tendency to either go on rough or fisheye. It'll take a day to see if it flows out as it dries, but it looked pretty rough after a few coats (tack coat, then a couple of light color coats). I think I was so worried about going too slow and getting runs that I went too fast and never got a thick enough layer to wet out. Lesson learned. I do like the dark color at least. I know I could technically wet sand and polish out the roughness in the paint to make it nice and smooth, but given that it's mostly for parts that are either in the baggage area or otherwise mostly out of sight, I don't think I'll do that. We'll see how it looks in the next day or two. It's a relatively shiny paint, so it actually may be better in the long run if it has a little roughness to it - I think for a baggage area, the slightly rough texture will hide scratches a little better. So maybe a silver lining. We'll see.
The painting of the interior panels and roll bar parts only took a few hours since, for the most part, I just had to do one side of everything. I wasn't going to paint the interior, but since the temperature was cooperating I thought I'd clean one interior panel...then another, then another. At some point I just decided I may as well dive in and paint the interior and be done with everything so I can start putting it all together! I scratched up everything with the scotch brite pad, then cleaned it with the alcohol. I don't actually know exactly which parts will be covered by the seats and side panels, so I had to do a little bit of guessing. I taped things off and put up plastic.
Most of the baggage area got painted, aside from the lower forward side skin. That gets covered up by a removable panel. I have to admit, I didn't spend a ton of time masking everything off to make paint lines perfect. For areas that will be covered up by the interior and rarely be seen, the effort to make it all perfect just didn't seem worth it.
