Originally Posted by worldcrafter

ok so I went at it again today with the paint, and the ratio of paint/mineral spirits that I mixed up yesterday seemed to lay on very good. It rolls on extremely thin, with the paint blotting together to form circles on the my trunk surface. After a little while, most of the paint seemed to level out fairly well. I had to lightly roll over the paint with the foam roller since there were tons of bubbles. Using only the weight of the roller as suggested on Moparts forum, the foam roller pulls on the paint bubbles, causing them to pop, without distorting the rest of the paint surface. Works really well, I'm sure I've got the hang of this. I can still (barely) see the blue surface of my original paint that I'm going over, so I guess the proportions are good, maybe I could add a little more paint.

What I noticed this time around is that the paint sticks really hard when layed on thinly. The paint I put on yesterday was super easy to scratch off with my finger nail. I guess the problem was that the paint was rolled on so thickly, that the top layer of the paint created a barrier between the air and the bottom layer that I rolled on (yes I overlapped the sh*t out of the paint yesterday, in addition to not using enough mineral spirits), which kept the bottom layer from flashing. However, today's thinly rolled-on layer dried within the first hour, and I swear it did not wanna come off at all when I tried scratching it with my fingernails.

What I have realized so far is that the most time-consuming thing above all else when painting a car is body work and prep work. The painting part only takes a few minutes, but the body filling, priming, and worst of all, sanding--is what takes the very longest. I have my porter cable and an array of sanding discs to help speed the process though. what a great tool to have