The Wesco guys in Auburn are helpful and not pretentious.
Red is the most expensive color you can buy.
I’ll reserve comment about spending many hours and $ to get a vehicle ready to paint and then using cheap oil based paint. But it doesn’t make sense for about all the reasons one can think of.
@Girth i know you’re now on short clock weather wise, but reccomend Tamco and with their frequent sales, you could get one of a few different types of high quality 2k urethane red for around $300/gal. Probably be double much that for shop line PPG Omni at Wesco. Pre Covid, it was about $60 for a half pint of maroon metallic single stage Omni at Wesco.
Burb takes alot of paint though! Youd need 2 gallons at least of single stage and probably use every drop of it and be sweating it. Even more if it’s cheap paint. So the Wesco guys aren’t totally wrong from an economical standpoint. You could base coat it easily with a gallon of base and have enough leftover to fix every whiskey dent for the next 15 years. And clear coat is about half the price of red ss or base. It makes sense financially and durability wise to do base/clear.
That financial gap narrows with cheaper colors but the other advantages of 2 stage are still the same.
I’m assuming you just want a bright red or are you matching a factory color?
Another way to save a buck is get some cheaper urethane base or single stage preferably base and basically guide coat the vehicle first so your top coat base or single stage will cover quicker.
Just some thoughts, paint is expensive. Cheap paint is disappointing in the long run but there are ways to save a buck.
For example when I did the blue truck, I “accidentally” used the wrong color base coat on the first panels I “tested” on. Got the wrong shade but went ahead and base coated the the underside of the hood and inside of tailgate and some misc trim pieces. It was close and what I found is the right color covered MUCH quicker. Took one less coat. So when I did the inside of the bed, I burned up more of that leftover wrong shade of light blue. In the end I painted everything but the inside of the cab and underside of the bed (did black). I used Less than 3 qts of base coat. If I’d base coated the rest the wrong color first, I could have probably done the whole truck with 2 quarts of base.