This weekend has been very productive already. The wife and I located and stocked our new raised garden bed that I built last weekend, I cleaned up all the parts for the drill press, ordered the rest of the necessary parts, and began painting.
For this restoration job, I specifically bought a HF purple HVLP gun to spray the parts. This is my first attempt at spraying paint, so be easy on me with criticism......there are plenty of people who create masterpieces with much more pricey guns
bowdown
, I am not one of those people.
I have been contemplating the best way of setting up a 'paint booth' for this. Should I clean up the garage and put up some plastic? Should I do it outside with just a backdrop of plastic? Should I take it to a friends shop?
Then it dawned on me.........I have a shed that contains things that don't really matter if they get paint on them
. So "paint booth":
The first thing I did was shoot some rustoleum primer on the bottom of the base:
Next, I shot was a second coat of primer on all the parts after sanding down some of the runs that came from the rough brushing my father in law and I put on in the middle of winter to stop the rust.
I think that I thinned the paint a little too much for the primer coat, either that or I paid it on too thick, or a little of both. Either way, not too bad, a little sanding and no more runs.
After drying for 3-4 hours, I thought it was pretty good (our temps were up in the low 80s today), so I went ahead with the first coat of final finish. This was a custom mix from Sherwin Williams (primer is SW too).
I mixed the top coat a little thicker than the primer which really seemed to help with runs, but I also went much lighter on the spray. I mistakenly sprayed a little too high on the psi, but it didn't seem to hurt the process at all.
All in all, I am fairly pleased with my first attempt.
I will try to get picture out in the sunlight tomorrow, the flash and the shed are not helping the color very much.......
