Paint questions

Where are you guys buying your paint from and who has the best prices? Also when do you add your hardener to your paint, if you use any? Do you have your paint mixed, or can you get it correct paint from a dealer? Sorry for so many questions. Thanks in advance guy's have a good evening.

Depends on the quality of paint job you want. If you want a good paint job that will last for a couple decades use the same paint the autobody people use to paint cars with. Automotive paints will be more colorfast but they come with a healthy price tag. I just bought a quart of a metallic base coat today for a car that was 120.00 for a quart. That is just the color. It will have to be topcoated with a clear to finish the job. The solid color one step urethanes you might use for a tractor would be less expensive.

If you are going to use a common enamel I've had pretty good luck with Rustoleum Tractor and Implement paint. I painted a Kubota tractor a couple years ago and the paint is holding up well with minimal fading. The last time it was painted I used Valspar tractor paint and you could almost see it fading daily. Within a year that orange tractor was peach color. Cheaper paints containing red pigment are especially prone to fading.

Hardener is good to use with enamel paints. It improves the sheen and makes it last longer. You mix it with the paint as you use it. The down side is you have to be careful to only mix hardener with paint you intend to use right then. It won't keep. You can put it in a air tight container and by the next day it will either be hard or at least unusable. The hardeners with urethane paints won't keep much more than an hour. You have to use all you can and immediately wash the sprayer out. Also the hardeners for some urethane paints are very dangerous to work with. Those that contain isocyanate hardeners you have to have a air supplied respirator to work with it. Even breathing a small amount and even if you wear a conventional respirator it will hurt you. I know this first hand because I painted a tractor with Dupont Nason using less than two gallons of paint. I knew it had the isocyanate hardener in it so I sprayed the tractor outdoors wearing a respirator and holding my breath when down wind from the paint. After which I coughed for six months. The paint went through the respirator. An air supplied respirator has a compressor you put somewhere where the air is clean and it pumps fresh clean air to the respirator instead of trying to filter the paint out.

The loader is John Deere rattle cans and the 4020 I painted in 2003 with John Deere paint with a 20 dollar harbor freight gun in a garage with one light bulb the night before the local tractor show. The tractor sometimes gets washed once a year sometimes not it?s been polished one time

From an auto body supply brand name paint like PPG or Matrix etc. Cost of paint worries put you in the wrong hobby. Good paint ain't cheap --cheap paint ain't good.

I think bang for the buck, you cant beat the paint and hardener from the implement dealer, the colors will match and the price is good.

Stephen made very good suggestions, paint with supplied air, and it is IMPORTANT to not enter the area without supplied air until several hours after painting and most of the isocyanates have gone away. I get wheezy if I get near the painted part within a few hours.

Not everybody needs a 5000$ paint job i decided to put the money where it counts in the mechanical end of it rebuilt every component on my 4020 i put 16000$ into the mechanical end of the tractor and I did all the work except machine work myself . I only about 300$ into body work and paint . You can make a tractor look pretty good without fancy paint

A cheap paint job will last if you park it in a barn, or something when the tractor is not being used. Also use the gloss hardener with the proper reducer, its not cheap but it helps the paint last much longer.

Getting the best price on paint is important if you are doing a five hour prep job, but not such a good idea if you are putting fifty hours into prep. I have done each so I have bought both tractor dealer paint and lower end automotive paint.

Rust-o-leum paint from Home Depot for $9 a quart, and little automotive enamel reducer with the hardener.



For the MF flint metallic gray I mixed a quart each of rust-o-leum smoke gray, aluminum, and gloss black. For the MF silver a quart of smoke gray, and a quart of aluminum. For the red I used rust-o-leum Sunrise red (even though its not the correct color), the gray, and silver aren't correct, but its close enough for me.