All good advice. I began painting cars back in 1976. We used lacquer (not durable or very protective) back then, and if you wanted durability at the expense of depth of finish, we used hardened enamels. Eventually, DuPont developed Imron, which was a urethane based product which eventually gave way (despite its excellent performance) to base coat/clear coat urethanes due to lower pricing and easier application. Imron is still the king of durability, but it has a high difficulty factor due to the need to force dry to achieve good depth of gloss. My mentor nailed it with his usage of lacquers finish coated with clear Imron with metal flake in the clear coat. He liked to paint the pinstripes on before the clear coat laden with metal flake over the lacquer. The depth was awesome and the finish was durable.
I love today''s polyurethane clear coat systems which are designed to work with their polyester base coat. The stuff is extremely forgiving, easy to work with and offers decent durability. I painted the Redmobile III with WandaBase HS from AkzoNobel (yup Alfred's chemical company). AkzoNobel makes most of the German automakers OEM paint, including Mercedes and Porshe IIRC. WandaBaase HS is their value line, but the pigments are a high quality, and my jobber recommended I try it. It is really inexpensive compared to the Deltron I was looking at, but so far it has held up well (3.5 years).
One thing I will warn you about. Read up on how to handle the urethane bumper covers. I hadn't touched them in years (my day job is CAD developer, not bodyman anymore) and I found out the hard way that you shouldn't take them down to bare urethane. When sanding them bare, the surface tends to ball up, and nobody recommends that you try this. Unless you have a complete loss of paint, DON'T TAKE THE BUMPER COVERS DOWN TO BARE. I used tycoat adhesion promoter and some flex additive in all my primer fill coats to get my surface ready for the seal coat, base coat the clear coat.
Purchase more paint than you need and practice some before you begin. You want to avoid orange peel but if you get some, with base coat clear coat systems wetsanding and buffing is a lifesaver. I learned on my last spot paint job (my friend's Ford Excursion) that adding up to 10% reducer even though not instructed to really helped flow of the last few clear coats and they flashed beautifully.
Check out autobody101.com for lots of experienced advice.
HTH,
Ron