Shake, rattle, and sand

One nice sunny day, I started laying out and cutting the top trim pieces. Then I just had a 5, 10, 15 step process to prime, undercoat, paint, and overcoat them.

So first, can I say how lucky I am? The lime green I used for the door and panels (remember – Sherwin-Williams, not Benjamin Moore!) has a very close match in Krylon spray paint, under “Jungle Green.”

That’s very useful because these little meal pieces would be very hard to paint well with latex paint. I mean, maybe I could setup my airless sprayer and stuff, but latex would be a thicker film that I’d like. So… lots of spray cans it is.

So, the above pictures look like everything is going well, but in the end, more steps were required to get a really good finish:

• Primer: aluminum primer, particularly to prime the cut ends, plus to touch up miscellaneous scrapes and marks on the metal from handling/shipping.
• Undercoat: Use an off-white color to even everything out (the factory mill primer is an off-white).
• Color coat: 2-4 coats of green, about 30-60 min apart, depending on how it’s covering.
• Finish coat: 1-3 thin coats of matte clear coat, because the green is gloss and the panels are matte.

If there are any blemishes in any of these steps, clean up, patch, light sand, then go backwards one step. It’s… a process. Painting is not simple, yo.

Aside: initially I was thinking that these spray cans seem really small and it gets quite expensive. But in reality, it’s $6.50 for 10oz of paint. 128oz in a gallon means about 12 * $6.50 or $78. Meanwhile, a gallon of high end latex is somewhere between $80 and $100. So, it’s really not that bad afterall.