Orange peel help

Hi Guys,
Currently spraying my whole 90 inside my garage with polythene sheeting up everywhere. I'm painting it with tractor primer and top coat which is a synthetic enamel. So far, the whole thing is in primer and it looks ok but there is some slight orange peel (I believe this is caused by my primer going on too thick).

My question is, do I really have to wet sand the whole car or can I just put a few coats of top coat on and wet sand it with something like 2000 grit?

I've heard tractor isn't the best to polish or wet sand but I'm sure once it's properly hard it must polish up a bit.

Cheers,

David.

Whenever I am painting vehicles I always wet flat the primer.
Horrible, messy, time consuming job, but needs must..

Thanks for the reply.

What do you do around rivet heads? I am taking all of the paint off of them but this might not be a huge problem.

I gave up on the idea of being able to cover primer defects with top coat a long time ago - it just does not happen.

You know what they say about preparation being everything and all that - if the primer is no good, then you just cant make up for it with top. You can try, but youll waste way more time than just getting the primer right to start with.

You are right, synthetic tractor enamel does take a while [can be several days] to go hard.But then is well hard and resistant to damage while still remaining flexible.The top coat that is.

What will happen is you will flat off your tractol or whatever and the high points in the primer will come through leaving you little grey spots everyehere.

I saw a video once saying that if you want to see what the finish will be like, wipe a wet cloth across the primer (after it's dried, obviously).

Decent advice, even if it was from a channel called "Hack and Pack Shop" Whatever imperfections you have with the primer will be there regardless of the top coat.

I find I can get a good finish on Tractol with the right amount of thinners on a good day, but primer deffo needs sanded if you want a good finish (I don't always bother for workshop machinery)

Top coat is only ever as good as what's underneath it. It needs flatting back before you put top coat on.