This is the scary time. You've just spent weeks, perhaps months, prepping the body for paint, laid on that expensive, two-stage paint with the color followed by the clearcoat, and now it's time to ...

So we started digging--visiting the various paint companies' Web sites,talking to painters we knew, reading material tech and safety sheets,boning up on our chemistry . . . until at one point, we saw ...

We showed up with our freshly painted project FearleSS that already sports an Axalta two-stage paintjob. The car had been sprayed a month earlier and was now ready to be color sanded and polished.