DIY Car or Truck Painting Tips How to Paint Your Bumper to Save Money

Did you crack your bumper, you ordered a new one and now you need to paint it to match the car? Well, it's gonna cost you about $1200 to have it painted at a professional shop, maybe your car's not even worth $1200. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to paint it so you don't do this.

We have our bumper cover here, we're setting it up on some stands outside. Now, ideally, if you had a paint booth, and you could heat this up in the paint booth get it nice and warm, and then wash it off, that's what you'd wanna do. We don't have a paint booth so we're gonna use the sun, warm it up, leave it outside for about half an hour to an hour.

Now we're gonna wash it down just like washing a car. We'll start by rinsing it. And use some soapy water. Make sure you scrub it really good. And rinse it off. Then you wanna dry it off, we're gonna use an air nozzle but you could dry it by hand with a towel. What you could do at this point, is take a non-abrasive scuff pad and just wipe the whole thing down. You're gonna scuff up the bumper a little bit just so the primer and the paint stick to it a little better. Take a look at your old bumper and figure out what parts need to be painted and what parts need to be taped up. In this bumper, this area right here is the plastic black and the rest of it is the color of the car. So we're gonna tape up this section now just use some standard painter's tape. And just go along wherever you don't want paint. The more time you spend, the better it's gonna look.

Wow, look at that. Way to go rock star.

So this is looking pretty good. It's all taped up. If you have something called a tack cloth, you wanna take a tack cloth and go along and pat it down. Get any dust or dirt or debris off that you don't want underneath the paint. We're doing this outside today, it's a nicer day. It's not too windy, we're not getting a lot of dust come up and there's not a lot of pollen on the trees as of right now. So, we're not probably gonna have any issues with the paint. We could get a little bugs here and there. But if you wanted to do a more meticulous job, do it inside, do it in a garage, make sure it's a well-ventilated area. We're also going to be using color match rattle cans to keep the price down.

Hold on, I'll get this. Because it's the plastic bumper, we're gonna use some plastic adhesive promoter primer, and we're gonna do that first. So shake up the can, pretty much follow the directions on the can. Make sure you wear a mask. And then we're just gonna prime it, just like you were priming like regular primer. A little bit of wind there. It's gonna go on clear. Keep about 10 inches to a foot away. I know it's not quite a foot away, but it's a little windy. All right. So we're gonna do that three times every three minutes per the can. After that, we're gonna wait 10 minutes and then do our color.

All right. Now we're gonna wait 10 minutes and then put on our color. Depending on how warm it is outside, you may have to warm up the cans of paint. What you do is take a bucket of warm water, you just take the paint cans and just put them into warm water. That way the paint is at least warm when you go to use it. Now we're ready for paint. Wherever there's areas where it could potentially pull up like in these areas or on the lines and the edges. We're going to paint those areas first and then go back over and paint the rest of it. Just go back and forth, just like that. Nice thin coats. Now the first coat is done we're gonna wait 10 minutes and do another coat.

All right. So now I'm on my last coat. I've gone through almost three cans of this. I probably should have ordered four, so I could do one more coat after this. But that being said, order more cans than you think. Now I'm gonna use some clear coat, we're gonna do it pretty much the same procedure as the color. Just give it a coat. We're gonna put this on a little bit thicker than we were putting on the paint, just so it has a nicer finish. Just be careful, don't go too thick because you don't want any runs. Oh, I got a little bit too much clear on there and there's my drip. That's the only drip I've had so far. It's really not that bad. So that's what happens when you put a little too much paint on. I was probably a little too close too.

All right. Ten minutes later, we're gonna give it another coat. Just keep going till I run out of clear. Oh, there's a bug, you wanna see the bug? See if I can get it off without messing it up. Come on. There we go. That's fine. Now it's all painted and dried. And now we're just gonna take off the tape. It seems like the tape is sticking. You might need a razor blade. It's looking pretty good. Ready to put on.

So that bumper came out really well and we did it for less than $100 which is awesome. So if you do this yourself, you can save yourself tons of money. If you enjoyed this video or it helped you out, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos. You want me to juggle them?