I've been driving my 4Runner around for several weeks now with gleaming-white fiberglass fenders. This wouldn't be so bad, but the rest of the 'Runner is black, and the fenders stick out like a pair of sore thumbs. I'd been planning to get some high-quality automotive paint and do the job myself, but my 'to-do' list has pre-empted the painting several times.
I decided I couldn't stand it any longer. The fenders were gonna be black, and I didn't care if the paint wasn't perfect.
I recently did two truck features that had rattle-can paint jobs. Each one looked great! Why wouldn't mine look great, too?
Convinced rattle-can paint would look acceptable, I got several cans of Rust Oleum at the hardware store. I called a friend to give me a hand with the prep and the paint. We've traded help on each other's trucks several times, so I asked him to paint the fenders while I worked on some metal fabrication.
He prepped the fenders by wet sanding, and then thorougly dried them. After a thorough can-shaking session, he started spraying. Things got ugly fast. The paint didn't like the fiberglass, and it showed up in the form of 'fish eyes' which are little craters in the paint where it didn't stick.
There weren't one or two fish eyes. There were dozens, hundreds even. Whole swaths of fish eyes began to look like the Milkey Way on a clear desert night. He objected a couple of times, but I encouraged him to finish spraying both fenders.
At the end of the spraying session, he was even more dismayed. I took a close look and came to the same conclusion: the paint was unacceptably bad, and would make the rest of the truck look hacked together, despite an array of high-quality suspension, rolling stock, and a handful of meticulously-fabricated items.
The paint had to go. We grabbed a gallon can of acetone, a bunch of paper towels, and a box of disposable gloves.
The paint came off, but not before we'd used about a half-gallon of acetone and several wads of paper towels. Much of the fiberglass gel coat came off in the process, but the nasty black paint was gone.
I'll get some better paint, real automotive paint, and go for a re-match. I've had good luck with Rust Oleum on metal, but it's clear that something in the fenders and in the paint was incompatible. I did not use primer, which may have been the difference between the aforementioned trucks' rattle-can paint jobs and the one I tried with the help of a friend.
I took no pictures because I didn't want anyone to use them against me in the future. Without photographic proof, how do you know it actually happened? You don't, and that's the beauty of it.