Painting a Cerbera at home — door shuts and engine bay first

Painting a TVR Cerbera at home in a farm-shed style setup is entirely possible — you just have to accept that you’re not going to nail it the way a professional booth would. This page collects the practical lessons from the “cheapest Cerbera in the UK” restoration series, focusing on the sequence, the tools, and the mistakes that are worth making privately before the main body goes on.

Order matters — shuts and engine bay first

The car’s outer body panels are the visible surface, and the top coat there needs to be as close to perfect as you can manage. That means:

Door shuts, engine bay, boot area, vanity strips — paint these first. You will make mistakes; these are the places nobody will see them.
Main body — paint last, ideally with a friend who paints often standing next to you.

The door shut has to come off looking OK because the doors sit against it, but if the base or colour coat is a bit patchy it will still be closed away most of the time. The engine bay is worse still — bonnet down, nobody sees it.

Painting these first serves two purposes: you get colour on the car (motivating), and you burn through your beginner mistakes on surfaces that don’t matter as much.

Prep — what actually happens

The Cerbera body is fibreglass (GRP), so prep is different from a steel car. Fresh GRP where holes have been cut (see quad headlamps for how those went in) needs extra attention because the edges are un-sealed and there’s usually some filler blending going on.

Rough sequence:

Sand back the whole car with 220–280 grit where filler and epoxy work has been done.
Filler primer / 2K primer — a couple of coats. U-POL two-part filler primer is what got used on this car. Do the panels first; keep going back over dings and low spots.
Guide coat — a very light misting of contrasting-colour rattle-can paint sprayed over the whole primed surface. When you sand back, the guide coat highlights every low spot the primer hasn’t filled and every high bump you’re about to break through. Don’t skip it.
400 grit the guide coat back until you can’t see it any more, then check for pinholes and low spots. Fill and re-prime those.
600 grit for the final flat before base coat. Wet-and-dry pads work; you can also get 600-grit Scotch pads that get into corners the DA can’t reach.

Soft-edge masking

Painting only the shuts and engine bay first means you have to blend the paint into the outer body panels somewhere. If you mask with straight tape you get a sharp edge you can pick with a fingernail — awful.

The trick — thanks to Paul at WHM Auto Body — is to use soft-edge foam masking tape, which is a roll of tape with a raised foam bead down the middle:

Mask so the foam sits 5–10 mm inside the main body line, on the outside of the shut you’re painting.
Cover the rest of the panel with paper as normal.
Paint through: base, colour, clear.
The foam gives a feathered edge instead of a sharp one.

When the main body top coat goes on later, the process reverses: doors on, foam on the door edge, and the clear coat blows into that foam bead. Nobody sees the join once the door is shut.

Three-stage paint

The colour used on this build is a three-stage red — the actual colour code is proprietary to a specific supplier but the process is universal:

Base coat — a light silver / metallic ground coat that gives the top colour its depth.
Colour coat (mid coat) — the tinted middle layer. This is where number of coats matters: put on three coats of the mid on one panel and two on another, and the final colour will be visibly different.
Clear coat — the final glossy protective layer.

Because coat count changes the appearance of the colour, plan the sequence so all “same panel” pieces get the same number of coats. If you’re painting doors off the car and the car separately, do the doors and the surrounding shut area with the same number of mid coats.

Mistakes made painting the shuts

Full honesty — the first paint on this car was rushed. What went wrong:

Forgot to add thinners to the base coat. The gun looked like it was misbehaving. Blamed the gun, swapped to a different gun, still not right. It wasn’t the gun.
Persevered anyway — got the base and mid coat down knowing they weren’t ideal.
Clear coat needs less thinners — so ironically the clear went on fine, which is when the earlier mistake became obvious in retrospect.

The end result on the shuts has some texture and splodges in the base that won’t sand out and won’t polish out, because they’re under the clear. Options at that point:

Live with it (the shut is 90 % hidden by the closed door)
Sand it all back and start again (correct answer for the main body — wrong answer for practice panels)

Doing the shuts first exists exactly for this reason. Now the mistake is remembered before the main body goes on.

The farm-shed reality

You are not going to paint in a booth. That’s fine. What matters:

Dust control — light water on the floor before you start.
Overspray — mask way further out than you think you need to.
Temperature and humidity — 2K reacts. Cold + damp = bad. Hot + still = bloom. Do it in the evening when the shed is closer to a stable temperature.
Give the primer real time to flash off between coats. You can’t sand fresh 2K primer five minutes after putting it on — you’ll drag it around and pull it off.

What comes next

After the shuts, engine bay, boot and vanity panels are done, the main body is next. That’s where a paint-shop friend who does this weekly is worth their weight in filler. Paul at WHM Auto Body will be helping on this car when the main body is ready.

Watch the videos

The full builds these notes came from:

PT9 — detail primer prep around the quad headlamps — guide coat, filler primer, blending around the fresh GRP cutouts.
PT10 — first paint on the door shuts + engine bay — soft-edge masking, base coat, mid, clear, mistakes.

Related on this wiki: quad headlamps mod · Cerbera model overview · suppliers.