Electric Car Paint Sprayer - What You Need to Know Before Spray Painting Your Electric Car

Car enthusiasts around the world are passionate about maintaining and upgrading their vehicles to look and perform the best. Some people tend to shift to newer cars while some enjoy giving their automobile a complete makeover to look brand new.

One way of customizing your vehicle to look new, fresh, and a reflection of your unique taste, personality, and skill is to give your vehicle a paint job. You can choose to visit a professional car workshop that specializes in painting automobiles, or you can do it yourself in your garage using an electric car paint sprayer.

Continue reading below to learn about all that you need to know before spray painting your car using an electric car paint sprayer.

Table of Contents

What Is an Electric Car Paint Sprayer?

Electric car paint sprayers are specialized tools designed to paint the exterior body of a car. One can use a paint sprayer to cover previous paint damage or scratches on the exterior or to give the car a completely new paint job.

Electric car paint sprayers come in different sizes and can be used for personal as well as commercial automobile paint jobs. Automobile workshops that specialize in painting a vehicle’s exterior usually have a larger, more powerful electric car paint sprayer to cover a great surface area in little time.

The price of an electric car paint spraying gun will vary according to the manufacturing brand’s market reputation, the quality of the sprayer, and its size.

Moreover, many global companies have manufactured special paints for these electric car paint sprayers. They come in a wide range of colors to fulfill all kinds of consumer needs.

More common colors, such as black, white, silver, etc., are relatively cheaper compared to unique colors like cobalt blue, deep burgundy, neon green, etc.

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How Does an Electric Car Paint Sprayer Work?

An electric car paint sprayer uses a unique mechanism called electrostatic painting to make painting a car easy and efficient.

To understand how the electrostatic painting process works, one needs to learn what an atom is and how magnetism works. The major points to understand are as follows:

Atoms that include an equal number of protons and electrons are called neutral particles
Atoms with a higher number of electrons have an overall negative charge
Atoms with a higher number of protons have an overall positive charge
If the opposite poles of a magnet are brought together, they create an attractive force
If the same poles of a magnet are brought together create have a repelling force

The charge on an electric particle works just like the poles of a magnet. This means that two positively charged atoms will repel one another while two oppositely charged particles will develop a strong attraction force.

Automobile and color engineers have used these concepts to create the electric car paint spraying gun that maximizes painting efficiency and reduces paint wastage.

The electric car paint sprayer first atomizes the paint into individual particles. It then passes the paint through a high-density area of electrons to add a powerful electric charge to the atomized paint particles.

The electrically charged paint is then projected towards an automobile’s metallic body. The body of an automobile has a neutral electrical condition.

Hence, by the laws of physics, a strong attractive force is developed between the electrons of the paint and the neutron of the car’s body.

As a result, the charged paint atomic particles are forced to spread across the automobile’s body evenly and efficiently. Certain measures can ensure that the paint job is perfect and the car looks brand new.

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Complete Guidelines for Using an Electric Car Paint Spraying Gun

Although going to an automobile workshop that specializes in vehicle paint jobs requires much less effort to get a professional-quality paint job, it is often much pricier than doing it yourself.

Moreover, many car enthusiasts prefer to do it themselves to fully flex their creative muscle.

In order to paint a vehicle using an electric car spraying gun by yourself, you need the following equipment:

Sanding pads, powder sander, and 1000 to 2200 grit sandpaper
Cleaning solvent
A high-quality electric paint spraying gun
An air compressor
Primer, masking tape, spare sheets of paper (newspaper), enamel, polyurethane paint, and paint thinner
Mineral spirits
Safety coat, gloves, glasses, and a face mask

All these items can be purchased from a local hardware store and can also be ordered online. Once you have gathered all these items, you need to proceed toward preparing the car, the location, and yourself for the paint job.

Remember to understand every process in detail before you start handling the paint spraying gun. Going into the process without sufficient information could result in a poorly done paint job that will require a lot of money to get professionally corrected.

Hence, follow the following steps with care and patience:

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Step 1: Choose the Right Location for the Paintjob

The first step before you start the actual painting process is to find a suitable location. The right location for an automobile paint job needs to:

Have sufficient space for your car, the equipment, and for you to move around comfortably.
Be properly ventilated. Accumulation of paint fumes in a poorly ventilated space can cause a person to feel dizzy and nauseous. Moreover, it can also affect a person’s vision and will consequently result in a poorly done paint job.
Be properly illuminated so ensure that you are able to perform the paint job neatly, with high precision.
Have an electricity connection to power your electric car paint spraying gun.
Clean and free from dust. Excessive dust particles in the air could cover the surface of the car’s metallic body. As a result, the attractive forces between the paint and the car’s body are reduced, and the paint does not spread out evenly.
Be clear of any heating source, such as a fireplace or a heater. Paint fumes have a lot of alcohol, which makes them highly flammable.

Step 2: Prepare Your Car’s Body for the Paintjob

The paint will not spread evenly over imperfections on your car’s metallic body. Hence, for a beautiful, error-less paint job, you must:

Remove the dust from your car’s body
Have all visible dents or scratches fixed
Remove and repair any rust from the car’s body
Remove all moldings and trims for the paint job

Step 3: Clean the Car’s Metallic Body

To ensure that the car is free of any dust, mud, or muck, you need to:

Prepare a solution of mixed mineral spirits or denatured alcohol.
Dip a rag in this solution.
Use the damp rag and rub it across the car’s body till all particles are removed and the surface is clean.

Step 4: Proceed Towards the Sanding Process

Any imperfections or roughness will prevent the paint from adhering to the car’s body. Hence, in order to ensure that the paint spreads across evenly, you need to:

Properly sand the car’s exterior
Make sure you cover every last bit of the body
Sand the surface till you manage to remove the car’s original primer coating and reach its bare metallic body

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Step 5: Tape all the Surfaces that Do Not Have to be Painted

When a car is taken to an automobile workshop for a professional paint job, they tend to disassemble the different parts of the car’s body that need to be painted. This is done to ensure that other parts such as the windows and tires do not get stained by the paint.

However, a DIY car paint job cannot be performed this way as a layman will not have the expertise or the tools to disassemble and reassemble a car’s parts. Hence, in order to protect the different parts of a car from being stained, you need to:

Cover the windows, glass, tires, door handles, etc., with spare paper sheets or newspapers and hold them in their place using masking tape.
Use multiple layers of newspapers or spare sheets to prevent the paint from penetrating down to the protected surface.

Step 6: Use an Appropriate Primer to Prime the Surface of the Car’s Body

Often times people tend to forget this step and end up regretting doing their paint job themselves. Priming the body of your car is an important process as it seals the surface of the car and prevents the paint from soaking into its material.

Once you have used sandpaper to smooth out the surface of the car’s body all the way down to its bare metallic surface, you need to:

Use an appropriate primer that is highly resistant to corrosion and is self-etching
Take the primer and patiently apply it across the surface of the car’s sanded metallic body
Allow the primer sufficient time to cure thoroughly. The correct instructions or duration and usage are specified on the container of the primer you use.

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Step 7: Repeat the Sanding Process One More Time

Once the primer has had the time to properly cure, you need to repeat the fourth step one more time. However, this time, you need to be a lot gentler.

Being too heavy-handed will end up removing the primer, thus ruining `all your hard work.

Step 8: Wipe the Surface with a Thinner

Once the car’s primed body is carefully smoothed out one more time with the sandpaper, the last step in the preparation process is to wipe the car’s body with a soft rag that has been dipped in a thinner solution.

Step 9: Paint the Car

Following the eight steps mentioned above would ensure that your car is properly prepared for a paint job. You can now move toward using the electric car paint spraying gun. You need to:

Choose a color. The tip here is to use an easily available color in case you need to redo some paint again in the future.
Connect the electric car paint sprayer to a power supply.
Hold the electric car paint sprayer at least 6 to 8 inches away from the surface of your car’s body.
Use a side-to-side motion to make sure a thin coat of paint is applied evenly across all the parts of the car. Usually, four to five coats of paint are enough to ensure every single part is covered.
Let the paint dry out completely before moving to the next step. The drying process can take anytime between 20 and 60 minutes.

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Step 10: Apply Lacquer to the Dried Paint

Once the paint has fully dried, use a high-quality lacquer to fully coat the surface of your car.

Step 11: Remove the Masking Tape and Newspapers

When the paint job is complete, carefully remove all the masking tape and the newspapers. Finally, to have a professional workshop-like finish, buff the surface with a car compound till its surface looks glossy.

Final Thoughts

Painting the body of your car using a paint sprayer gun is an excellent, cost-effective way to upgrade your vehicle’s appearance. All you need to do is follow the steps mentioned above to enjoy a ride in your freshly painted automobile.

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Matthew

My name is Matthew, staying in Seattle, Washington. Electric Vehicles (Electric Cars & Electric bikes) caught my attention for the last few years and my love for electric cars and bikes is everlasting. I spend many of my weekends traveling to various places all over various cities with my electric vehicle (e-bike and electric car). Here I am sharing my expertise, experience, and invaluable information about electric cars and electric bikes. Check out more.