How to Protect Your Car Engine

These are important things that you should know to protect your engine:

Change your oil and oil filter as specified in your manual — more often if your driving is mostly stop-and-go or consists of frequent short trips. A poll of ASE Master Auto Technicians revealed that regular oil and filter changes is one of the most frequently neglected services, yet one that is essential to protect your engine.

Replace dirty filters, such as air, fuel, and PCV. A poorly running engine is less efficient and burns more gasoline. And you may also have to restore headlights as its effect to your car perform.

Keep your engine "tuned up." Replace filters and fluids as recommended in your owner’s manual; have engine performance problems (rough idling, poor acceleration, increased fuel use, etc.) corrected. Given today's high-tech engines, it's wise to have this type of work done by automobile technicians who are ASE-certified in engine performance. 

 

How to Paint A Car Yourself

Its great for a first timer ignore the haters they probally can't even custom paint their finger nails.

How To Paint a Car 

Should you paint a car in pieces or not? It’s not a common question, but a good one.

But there will be the pro’s and con’s of painting a car or any project in pieces.

If you’re painting solid, metallic colors with no added flake, pearl or candy then you can paint in pieces or stages.

What I mean by stages is painting part of the car one day. Like your hood, fenders and bumpers, then painting the rest of the car the next day all in pieces in your garage.

The reason it’s ok to do this is because your colors aren’t custom. You’re not adding extra flake or pearl in your intercoat or in your clear coat.

If you are then color matching will be an issue. The reason why is that you won’t be able to SEE how your coats are laying on. Thus, not being able to correctly color match your panels.

If your painting all of your parts in the booth at once and in pieces, then yes. You can do this if you feel that you can lay even coats over all parts.

How to Paint a Car - Painting Custom Colors

The more custom your colors are, the harder it will be to color match. You’ll have to also ensure correct paint mixing ratios. Just like CANDY PAINTS. If spraying candy, it’s recommended to paint your car or entire project in one piece.

Unless the parts are small like a motorcycle fairing kit.

Then you can have your fenders, tank and side fairings all next to each other and painting them at once in pieces.

If painting something small like this, then yes painting custom all in pieces at once is the only real way to accomplish a world-class job.

As long as you have great lighting and all pieces are in good range to check for color matching you can basically spray custom colors with pearls, flake and even candy.

The whole point is not to spray custom colors such as added pearl, flake and candy in pieces on different days. If you’re doing all of this at once in your garage or spray booth on the same day, you can go for it.

I wouldn’t recommend this for newbies. If you are a newbie, and your thinking of shooting pearl, flake and even candy then spray your car in one piece.

It will give you a better chance to get a good color match, and remember, candies are the one of the hardest top coats to paint.

You must feel comfortable with your gun and have proper flow and distance down pat first. If not, you risk having a blotchy and uneven candy coat.

I hope this post made sense to you and thank you for reading and watching the video. If you haven’t watched the video, then it may make better sense to you so watch it.

Learning how to paint a car is fun and we want to help you understand all of the elements in a easy to learn way.

We want to make the process of learning this skill fun, easy and most of all we want  you to gain confidence that you can do this. And soon you’ll be achieving AMAZING RESULTS with any project that you decide to tackle. Please visit Learn Auto Body And Paint for more info. 

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How to Restore Headlights - Headlights Restoration Tips

You have 2 options when it comes to restoring headlamps. You will learn how to restore headlights below:

You can Sand & buff (what I usually do)
You can Sand and Clear Coat using a 2k automotive clear coat (like this post and video above)

PUSH PLAY BUTTON TO WATCH HOW TO RESTORE HEADLIGHTS DIY

In this post we will show you the simple process of wet sanding and clear coating your headlights with 2k clear coat. For those of you who don’t know what 2k clear is, basically you have 2 kinds of clear. The first one is 1k. You see then on the shelves of automotive stores like AutoZone, Checkers, O’Reilly and PepBoys. You know… Brands like  Krylon and Rustoleum.

They have no hardeners in them and are weak in durability plus they are cheap. You can use them, but you won’t get a long lasting finish if that’s what you’re looking for.

If you want to restore headlights by clear coating them, then I recommend to use a 2k clear coat like I do in the video on the top of this post. They can last longer and won’t fade out every year to 18 months. This method has been tested and used by many people.

There are Pros and Cons, and here are the Pros first.

Easy and affordable to clear coat your headlights
Longer lasting than buffing out headlights
Beautiful high finish gloss after clearing
Very durable when comparing to a 1k clear coat
The Cons

Takes 30 min longer because of masking and painting
You need to buy some automotive clear coat and a spray bottle
May peel in 3-5 years if in consistant sunlight. (you can always sand and re clear though)
So, yes! this is easy as heck to do and you can make your headlights look like new again. You can also start a mini business out of it, like I said one of our VIP members Gary did. Here’s a finished picture below of a completed headlight that we did on a Honda CRV.


In conclusion, when performing any kind of headlight restoration know that you have options. You can wet sand and buff or you can clear coat them. …And if you do clear coat them, then go with a 2k clear coat not a cheap 1k aerosol can of clear. You want them to last and by using a 2k clear coat, it will.

If you end up buffing them, just remember that you’ll probably have to do it every year or two depending on how much they wear off. It really only takes about 10 minutes to complete a pair if you buff them out and they will look nice.

Good luck with your headlight restoration projects or business!

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