Garage54
We’ve all wished that it was easier to paint our cars before. That’s nothing new: body work on a car is just complicated. When you need a new paint job, you’re going to have to spend some money. If you’re going to do it yourself, you need a pretty complex set-up.
What if you could just paint your car with a pressure washer, though? We know, normally a pressure washer is better for taking paint off cars, rather than putting it on them. But, with the right set-up, could you use a pressure washer as a makeshift paint applicator? Well, if a video from Garage54 on YouTube is to be believed, the answer is a resounding kind of.
We want to take a second to strongly encourage you to not use a pressure washer to try to paint your car. The goofy experiment by Garage54 only partially worked, and, even then, they used a lot of advanced techniques.
This would be tough even for a professional car detailer. Don’t try to use a pressure washer to paint a car unless you’re okay ruining both the car and the pressure washer.
The crew over at Garage54 rigged up a complex system to even make this possible. They attached a tank made from a plastic jug to the power washer, and used a metal fitting to funnel the paint out. This worked using a valve stem through a hole drilled in the side of the washer. That valve stem, in turn, pushed compressed air into the contraption, allowing the paint to flow. Without this, the paint would have simply clogged up in the pressure washer.
While the video doesn’t note the power of the washer, one could surmise it’s around 3,000 PSI. This is a bit ridiculous. It takes them less than a minute to cover the car in paint, though it’s far from pretty. When you have paint running down the car in runlets to the fender, you’ve got a problem.
In a strict sense, the Lada in question has been repainted. However, the results are… questionable, at best. It looks like someone sprayed a hose of paint at it for roughly one minute and then let that paint run until it dried. Which is actually what happened, funnily enough.
The bottom line is that you should definitely not use a power washer to paint your car. Either go to a proper body shop or learn how to do it the hard way. Your car will look leagues better than the poor Lada the Garage54 crew victimized.
