Fin

I'm finally done painting the Camry. I hope.

Today, I painted the last spot on the trunk and the entire hood.

Unfortunately, the spray paint borked on the second coat of the trunk paint and shot little paint pellets all over the place. I had to let it dry, sand it out, and shoot it again—but the texture still isn't quite right. I soaked it with another five coats, but you can still see the bumps in the paint. Thankfully, it's a very tiny spot and is halfway obscured by the trunk anyway, so I'm not fixing it.

The hood, as it turned out, was a giant hassle. The hood had a ton of shit on it from driving to Albuquerque and back a few times. Additionally, the shingles on the roof tend to shed little brown rock things that get everywhere, including all over my car. It took three washes to get most of the crap off of the hood.

Masking it took a solid hour to get right. I'm still not convinced I got the center line straight, either. It looks too far back on the left side.

I also wasted a ton of paint on the hood. Whereas two cans of primer have been enough to paint every other spot on the car with between 4 and 8 coats each, I only got two coats on the hood before the new can was nearly empty. I'm not planning on putting any more on.

To top it all off, it was [expletive deleted] windy the entire time. Getting my masking plastic properly aligned, taped, and kept in place took a good deal of effort. Thankfully, the wind didn't pick up between when I was masking and when I was painting (as it has in the past), which meant the plastic was safe from being blown onto the paint until I removed it.

It seemed really sunny when I started, and started raining around ten minutes after I pulled the plastic off and pulled the car halfway into the garage.

I would have just painted the car in the garage, but it's still (after 194 days) full of shit.