Kaitlin Ashleigh

00t444e

How much work are you willing to do and how much money do you want to spend? If you wanted to go cheap I have seen a few vehicles that where just sanded down primered and sprayed with rustolium in a spray gun and it looked pretty good. If you want to spend more time and money you can get preoffesional grade paint, base coat and clearcoat from an automotive paint store and do it all yourself.

PatHenry

Agree - it's a question of how much time and money you want to spend. The more $$ and time you are willing to take, the better the outcome will be.

You can sand it down, rattle can prime and rattle can white for a bit of time and not much money. If you want to invest in a proper spray gun, high quality paint and have a dust free environment to spray in, then it's more money, but will look much more professional.

Ralph77

I say Monstaline her.

dzywicki

Getting a good quality paint job is either not cheap or time consuming. I had to do some repainting on my YJ. I wanted to learn how to do it so I dove it. First I tried getting the factory paint color in a rattle can. very expensive and you do not want to paint anything more than a small panel patch with it. After that experiment, I read a lot more and then found a good paint shop. Getting the right color was a challenge for me (moss green YJ color only offered in 95 with 5-6 factory variants (meaning very different shading)). I only had to do a hood. For their lower end paint, it was $50 for a 1/2 pint. That was barely enough to cover just the outside of a wrangler hood. I used mostaliner on the raised center part. Then you get to clearcoat. You do not want to skimp on clearcoat or you will be right back to crappy looking paint pretty quickly. Clear was ~$75 for a quart and I used it all split between this and a partial respray on the hood of my XJ (with the raised panels on the hood done in Monstaliner)
For paint equipment, I used a harbor freight compressor (already had that) and a Campell Hausfield spray gun ($35). And a good mask (I got the finest particle filter one at HomeDepot. Came out looking really nice (I think). I like being able to say "I did it" when I talk to other Jeepers about it. So much better than "I paid $xxx for it".

If you don't want to regret anything and enjoy looking at your XJ (which you should), then do some reading on paint threads. It's a ton of work to take everything off to sand, prime and then paint, but it is doable. I would guess a good spray from a shop would be around $1500 easy if they do it with quality material.

Here is a pic of my XJ work. The chili pepper red had some variants and I ended up with one slightly off from the other panels.https://www.cherokeeforum.com/f2/0-c...233952/index7/

Here is pic of the paint I did on my YJ: https://www.wranglerforum.com/f218/f...j-2150377.html

Hope this is helpful. I know I agonized over what to do about paint. Worst thing is crappy paint job.

Monstaliner is a good choice. It comes in a bunch of colors, goes on pretty easy and seems pretty indestructible. Prep is much easier and it can go on with a roller. It will add some weight if the entire XJ is done in it.

dzywicki

And I forgot to mention primer. Extremely important. If you paint yourself, do not skimp on primer. Best bet is use material from the same manufacturer for primer, color and clear so you don't get any bad reactions. My first try, I went to bare metal and used self etching primer and did not properly cover that primer. the color did not bond well. Had to sand it all back off, then self etching, then used SEM primer. Results came out much better.

PoorMansWrangler