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How To Ruin Paint

To: british-cars@autox.team.net
Subject: How To Ruin Paint
From: megatest!bldg2fs1!sfisher@uu2.psi.com (Scott Fisher)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 15:53:26 PDT
I'd meant to wait till tomorrow, when the masking tape comes off,
but Chris' comments on rust and primer are too much to pass up.

It's always risky to say, "I've made every possible mistake" on
any subject, because there's the very real risk that you will invent
a new one immediately after having made this pronouncement.  But I
think it's safe to say that I've made at least a very serious subset
of the possible mistakes one can make while attempting to paint a
stripe on the nose of a GT-6+.

This article, then, is as the title suggests: a short treatise on
how to screw up a paint job.  Unfortunately, I screwed up in such a
small area that redoing it only took a few minutes.  This can be
rectified soon, as screwing up on, say, the Chevelle would take much
longer and be much more difficult to proceed from step to step.

Cleaning and preparing the surface with Prepsol doesn't constitute
part of ruining paint, so I won't say more about it here.  You should
only do this if you want the paint to adhere to the surface and if
you want the project to look good.  Somehow, I managed to do this
anyway, which in retrospect is pretty surprising.


How To Ruin Paint While Applying It

1.  Start with the color coat, then decide later to put the primer over 
it.  The nice thing about this is that even if you make the mistake of
following the directions on the can and applying a number of light mist
coats instead of gobbing on paint like a gang tagger, you still have 
time to mess it up by putting a heavy coat of high-build primer over
wet color coat.

2.  Having decided to prime the new color coat, be sure to put on a
REALLY THICK coat of primer to fill the little stone chips in the 
car's base paint.  This is especially effective if the color coat
isn't quite dry yet.  What happens is that the primer adheres to itself
but not to the color coat under it, and the primer -- which dries 
quickly -- shrinks.  Ever see the bottom of a lake bed when it
dries, and gets these nice cracks with an index of fractalization
of about 2.8?  This look is particularly effective if you're
using standard battleship-grey primer on top of metallic gold.
It's faintly reminiscent of a particular style of furniture that
I associate with Louis XIV, if memory serves -- is it fauteuil?

3.  Decide that the thing to do is put more color coat over the now
cracked and fractalized primer. This doesn't fill the cracks in the
primer, but it does make them look like one of those antiqued
gold-backed mirrors you often see in movie westerns to indicate that
the, um, saloon in which the action takes place is perhaps not the
Ritz, and that the character of Miss Trixie would probably not pass
the Church of England vetting for potential bride of the Crown Prince.

4.  Next, pour some more PrepSol on a blue shop towel and wipe the
paint with it.  This is about a push as far as ruining paint goes;
on the one hand, it is a step in the direction of not having ruined
paint, and therefore is a reversal of the steps taken thus far in
the procedure.  On the other hand, it makes what is on the car look
far more awful than anything hitherto attempted.  Specifically, it 
lifts the top layers of paint, and when you rub the rag across them
it makes little squidgy footballs of black goo like the stuff you
get when you rub between your toes after taking your shoes off on
a hot day.  The rest of the paint kind of puckers and shrivels at
the edges, but it wipes away.

5.  Sand the whole thing with 320 grit sandpaper on a block that you
dip into a bucket of water with a little dish soap dissolved in it.
Again, this is a push; it looks just awful, because you will 
eventually get down to the green paint on the car, leaving this
nice sort of moire effect where the two layers of gold, separated
by grey primer, finally meet the green.  But it does make the
surface smoother and fills in some of the minor nicks and body seams,
so it's really a step in the wrong direction if ruined paint is your goal.

6.  Re-prime over the sanded area, working for good coverage.  The
trick to ruining paint with primer is to lay it on good and thick;
it will always shrink and develop cracks if you do this.  Be sure and
don't ever do what we finally did three days later, which is to lay
on a number of fog coats that stay powdery and rough; that looks bad,
but is easily fixed, as will be explained shortly.

7.  Decide that the cracks aren't too bad, and that if you lay a
really thick coat of gold over them they might fill up.  What's
especially nice about this step is that it shows that you're really
dumb enough to get sprayed by a skunk more than once.  Most ordinary
people, having already been through Step 3, would not have tried this,
but if you're really dedicated to the task of ruining paint, this is
what separates the men from the Labrador Retrievers.  (Labs can't work
spray cans.)

At this point we had a minor setback, in the form of darkness, and
we had to let the paint cure for three days.  In retrospect this
was almost a mistake; on the one hand, the cracks were still there
when we returned to the task after 72 hours, but on the other the
paint actually looked pretty good, so we tried some more and ultimately
failed to ruin the paint.

8.  Sand the whole thing again with 320 grit wet paper.  This is another
of those judgment calls, as the paint looks really awful when you're done
with it but it's a step away from the ultimate direction of ruined paint.
I'f I'd really been trying to ruin the paint, I would have made sure to
bear down hard on the corners of the bonnet where they go into the
headlight buckets.  I'll have to remember that for the future.  In any
case, when you're done with this, you're back to the moire effect, only
if you try really hard you can remove some of the green paint and let
the yellow undercoating start to show through.

9.  Here's a negative recommendation: Whatever you do, if ruining paint
is your goal, DON'T apply six or seven very light fog coats of primer,
with the can held back 10-15" from the surface.  That puts an even coat
of pre-dried particles on the surface, and avoids the cracking and
shrinking of using wet primer.  It also lends itself well to using a
piece of Scotchbrite to smooth out some of the lumps, but if you're
really dedicated to the task of ruining this paint, be sure you don't
really rub it flat but put a final fog coat on over after the last
rubbing job.  

10.  Now, no matter what you do with your next color coat, the little
particles will show through, making the surface of the paint look like
an eggshell or stucco for a Barbie house.  Unfortunately, this is
too easily removed by color-sanding with 600-grit wet paper; if you
really want the ruined paint look, leave the gold paint like this,
as it's smeared, blotchy, and covered with tiny flattened lumps from
where you rubbed out the eggshell effect.

As a final step in ruining paint, just remember to use metallic in a
spray can, as the uneven propellant delivery will ensure a hammered
appearance as the paint comes out in circles.  Unfortunately, most of
this dries evenly after a few days, so I'm afraid that when we finally
see the paint on Friday it won't be ruined after all.  When we left it,
all the eggshell effect was gone, there wasn't even any orange peel to
speak of, and it actually even appeared to have filled in a number of
the tiny stone chips.  Disappointing, after spending so many hours
resolutely trying to screw up the paint job in every way we could think
of short of letting the cat walk on it (though I did pull a hair out;
wish I'd left it in, now).



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