Finally got around to painting the roof panel. It took around ten hours (spread over two days), a lot of which was spent waiting between coats, sanding back the etch primer, and mixing paint. I used about one litre of etch primer, 1.5 litres of colour, one litre of clear coat, and a bit over four litres of thinners for six square metres of panel.

Painted roof panel hanging from gantry

I ended up painting it all in one go. The smaller vertical pieces at the front and back came away from the main central section when I removed the rivets, so it would’ve been relatively difficult to mask things up properly. It also saved me a week, but this came at the expense of a more difficult process (there wasn’t much light behind the panel, and getting the curved section on the underside was difficult with a gravity-fed gun). Still, it seems to have come up alright. The gantry worked well, too.

This is the final part of bodywork that needed painting, so over the next few weeks I’m going to rearrange the garage a bit and get both this and the upper tailgate cut, buffed, polished and installed.