Strange paint question...

My neighbour has just bought a van from my boss for a bargain price on the condition that it has to return to its original colour as its currently in Dyno-rod dayglo orange. Today we were going to have a look at options for making it as cost effective as possible.

Anyone got any suggestions? We were wondering if with some light sandpaper the orange could be sanded back to the original white paint underneath and then mopped over with cutting paste so bring it back up? Or is it wishful thinking?

Any tips or ideas would be greatly appreciated

Not too sure, though it would be hard and the finish if it did work would be pretty dire.

Might be worth just getting some cans of spray and doing it that way if he isnt bothered about finish... lol.

It is a rough van anyway with pleanty of dings and knocks so it just needs to be as cheaply 'de-branded' as possible. £200 for a Y reg hightop transit with Tax and test just been serviced is a steal for carting the bikes about when he goes touring though!

i painted my hilux using a brush, used £11 worth of paint, used tractor paint, nice and tough, doesnt look too bad either.

Not a bad idea that man! Where can i buy tactor paint? Im guessing its not at my local Halfrauds

i got mine from the local farm supplier, new holland blue! but they had a load of colours, £9 a litre. all i did was sand back the old stuff, not all the way, but enough to provide a flat surface, then brush on the first coat very thinly, it will look patchy and almost see through but dont worry about that. then once thats dry slightly thicker coats can be applied and it will stick not run. as its straight out the can its quite thick and brush marks will settle out over 20 mins leaving a smooth finish. and use a good brush

[rowdy]

My grandad, god rest his soul, decided to spruce up an old morris marina van that he had by giving it a lick of magnolia gloss from the dulux range applied by brush. Of course I took the p*ss but his response was that this was the way that Rolls Royce did things so it was good enough for the marina van. I am sure that the bods at RR managed to get a better finish on thier vehicles though as my grandads van was covered in brush strokes and there were a few runs on there that you could of gone surfing on, but apparently cellulose car paint is much the same as household gloss, just don't expect it to dry for about a week in this weather. Give it a mop with some compound and it won't look that bad, not for a couple of hundred quids worth of tranny anyway.

Why does it have to go back to original colour?

De-branding only means you have to remove any company logos as far as I know, which will probably be vinyl decals (not sure if that's the right word! ) or something can have been applied on top of the paint. You don't necessarily have to give it a whole new paint job (which would also mean declaring the change of colour to the DVLA).

My Dad used to work for the Royal Mail on the fleet management side of things, and I used to see loads of ex-Royal Mail vans being sold on with the livery removed but still with their original paint. You could always tell cos the red paint faded pretty badly except for the bits that had been covered by the vinyl stuff i.e. the yellow stripes and the RM logo.

Sorry for late reply, The only problem is that the paint (called 'dyno-glo') is a trademark of Dyno-Rod and the boss needs to photograph it to confirm to head office it has been properly decomissioned.

So far have all the decals off and are scrubbing away at the nasty glue residue with petrol lol its slow progress though. We have tried some paints and seem to be getting best results using grey primer and hammerite 'spray's directly onto rust rattle cans. Will post some before and after pix when we are done lol