Achieving good results from a paint job requires meticulous preparation. This is especially true when the panel you’re painting is flat and more than a 100 square feet of area. When the finish is applied, the smallest preparation flaws will show.

More sanding with guide coat

After another morning of sanding, I moved the coach after lunch on Tuesday. I drove it to the dump station first – it had been only eight days but I thought I should dump the tanks since I was moving.

I set up the coach next to the paint booth. The painter, Steve had previously worked at a custom car shop. He excels at applying multi-colored paint schemes and is very picky about the surface preparation. He filled the corners of the edge moldings. Then he decided to use polyester resin to fill the entire joints where the edge moldings meets the sidewall. He told me there were small gaps in places and when the finish is applied the small gaps will show. They’re sealed underneath so no moisture would get through, but the paint wouldn’t look smooth over the gaps.

Polyester resin on the corner

Moldings filled with polyester resin and primed

This took more time to sand the resin and create a crisp edge along the moldings.

New site next to the paint booth

I looked at a couple of coaches that Steve recently painted. One, a Sportcoach, had been repaired and painted on the entire rear cap and some of the rear quarter. The areas Steve painted looked better than the factory paint. The areas where the color scheme changed color had slight ridge lines in the factory paint that I could feel with my fingers. The newly painted sections were totally smooth. The other coach was a Winnebago Tour and the factory paint had a slight orange peel look in places. The areas Steve painted were smooth as glass.

I have high expectations for the final finish on our new living room slide skin. Wednesday morning went by with more sanding and surface cleaning. The cleaning and degreasing took a lot of time. In the afternoon Steve started masking but was pulled off the job to handle an emergency repair that took about an hour. When he returned, Armando came with him to help.

They applied masking tape to the backside of the moldings which extended sticky side up about an inch beyond the edge of the molding. Then I pulled the living room slide in. The slide will stay in until the paint work is done. It’s a good thing to have a floor plan that’s usable with the slide in. The masking tape along the edge of the molding gave them a way to mask right up to the edge without overlapping any of the molding.

They used paper over the windows and around the slide. They also put paper on the roof, A/C covers and satellite dome. The front and rear of the coach were covered with plastic sheets.

Masked and ready for paint

The last thing Steve did was checking the color match of the Diamant paint. Meanwhile another worker started stripping the front lower panel. I’m having that refinished while were at it. It had large stone chips that were beginning to peel in areas.

Today we’ll finally start getting painted. The forecast looks good – we should reach 80 degrees today and tomorrow with zero percent chance of rain. Rain is likely to come over the weekend.