Update: 1988 Ford E-350 ShortBus Paint

[purpleshortbus]

We have finally painted our bus purple and wanted to share our procedure with any of you who might be interested.

First step - about 16 total hours of sanding....
Next - about 2.5 hours of disassembly and taping
Next - about 6 hours of spraying primer and moving ladders around
Next - about 3 hours of wet sanding and touching up
Next - about 5 hours of spraying paint and moving ladders around
Finally - about 1 hours of removing tape and touching up

Sanding was a royal pain. We finally purchased a Wagnor Paint-Eater from the local Lowes. It made our lives so much easier, but we complete destroyed one of them within the first 3 hours of sanding. Thankfully, Lowes returned it and gave us another one. This tool was vital to sanding around all of the rivits and screws

We sprayed exactly one gallon of Dupont Nason primer. This was enough to cover the bus. We sprayed it on thick on the roof because we wanted to make sure it was covered the first time. After the primer was mixed, it turned out to be exactly 1.5 gallons.

Two gallons of Dupont Nason single stage paint. We chose the paint color MB151 from NAPA's paint books because of the color and the purple metallic in the paint. - Note: painting a bus is not cheap.... This is our most expensive investment to date. (paint total was close to $700 - not counting tape and sandpaper) After mixing, this worked out to be almost 3 gallons of spray-able material. We put two coats of paint on and did a bunch of touch-up work.

Prism Powdercoating in Ayden, NC powder coated out light brackets and side mirrors. They look awesome!!!

Total paint expenses - $120 primer + $600 paint + $150 supplies = about $900. We are very pleased with the results and I cannot image any paint shop being able to match this price given all of the labor involved.












If you are interested... check out our website at http://www.purpleshortbus.com

[Stuff]

looks nice!

[ol trunt]

PSB, The purple looks great. What fun to be able to simply just paint your stuff like that. I did the same sort of thing hundreds of times as a kid here in California--not anymore though. Now in the South Coast Air Management District (So. Ca) the only automotive paint you can spray outside a spray booth is of the non refilable bug bomb type or a tiny air brush. The last shop I set up to spray paint in cost over $140,000 to build plus andther $15,000 in permits! The fines for scofflaws are high enough to impact your grandchildren!? Sooo, I am jealous Your paint job looks like it turned out good so you must have had some practice. Fun to paint though isn't it? Jack

[purpleshortbus]

Originally Posted by ol trunt

PSB, The purple looks great. What fun to be able to simply just paint your stuff like that. I did the same sort of thing hundreds of times as a kid here in California--not anymore though. Now in the South Coast Air Management District (So. Ca) the only automotive paint you can spray outside a spray booth is of the non refilable bug bomb type or a tiny air brush. The last shop I set up to spray paint in cost over $140,000 to build plus andther $15,000 in permits! The fines for scofflaws are high enough to impact your grandchildren!? Sooo, I am jealous Your paint job looks like it turned out good so you must have had some practice. Fun to paint though isn't it? Jack

Painting the bus was actually a lot of fun. Three of us guys who painted this are best friends and we really had a blast just working on something together. It is definitely not something that I would want to do every weekend, but it was definitely a fun experience. After painting a bus, we feel like we can do anything now.

Thankfully NC is much less strict than CA... We did have a friend offer for us to use his booth, but the height of the bus was a concern. spraying outside was not ideal, but it did allow us to walk around on the roof. Thankfully, we sprayed on days with almost no wind. We also wet the ground around the bus in hopes of preventing dirt from blowing up.