Autoflex

[hpclayto]

Like most black car owners I have a love/hate relationship with my car.

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I've had several over the years and swore them off after my last one. When I was looking to get an S3 I could only find a black one anywhere close to me. Probably should have held out for a different color but alas here we are. It was fine when I had a house with a garage but I have an apartment now with no means to properly wash or store my car. Needless to say I've been wanting to change the color of my car.I was initially going to go the vinyl wrap route but couldn't justify dropping 3 to 4k on that. Regular plastidip is cheap but just looks meh. Then I stumbled across autoflex and it seemed like the best option for me. It mimics regular paint and clear coat. You can sand/buff/wax/ceramic it like normal paint but is still peelable.

I've been doing paint and bodywork as a hobby since I was a youngster and my dad and I have a home spray booth so I have the proper equipment to do it. Note that they typically won't sell it to anyone other than their authorized installers. I had to send them pictures of my equipment and some of my projects before they agreed to sell it to me.

I can't take any not already scheduled days off from work with all the corona stuff going on. I had a four day weekend scheduled this month for a wedding but that got canceled so I figured tackling this project would be a good use of my time and I decided to pull the trigger on ordering the autoflex. I was going back and forth on colors. Finally decided on deep sea blue. It kind of mimics OEM Sepang Blue in the pictures but we'll see what it actually looks like on the car once it's done. I'm also going to black out all of the chrome.

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[hev702]

Kind of looks like a satiny Sepang.

Gotta give us pictures once it's done!

[hpclayto]

Kind of looks like a satiny Sepang.

Gotta give us pictures once it's done!

Yeah that picture is regular plasti dip. The autoflex will be a high gloss finish. I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures.

[hpclayto]

Finally got it done. Turned out great. Very cool stuff. I was really impressed with how well it sprayed and leveled. My car was ceramic coated so I had to polish all that off and then wash it a few times to make sure it was perfectly clean. I removed some things, wheel liners, reflectors, and just masked everything else off.

All in all it was 12 coats of product. Spray Wrap Pro X (SPWX) is the "base" coat for everything. It's clear and you can add tint's, pearls and metallics to it to create colors. I ended up doing 3 coats of clear, two coats of black, three coats of blue and then another coat of clear to seal it all in. The autoflex "gloss" is the topcoat, think of clearcoat in terms of normal paint. It's a three part mixing system, product, reducer and an optimizer. I did three coats of gloss. I also painted my grill and all of the chrome on the front before I did the autoflex.

There are also a few pictures of my spray booth.

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[hpclayto]

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