A few weeks ago somebody posted about having a decent looking paint job on his tractor but only using 2 quarts of paint. At the time I posted that it probably was too thin. My apologies to him for potentialy bad advise. Guess I have been working on too many large tractors lately as I just finished a model WD Allis that has at least three coats on every part of it and on the base castings I am sure that there are places with 4-5 due the difficulties painting such and my poor techniques. Anyway I finished last night and before I knocked the lid back on the can I dropped my paint stick in it to measure the left overs, almost exactly 2 quarts. This WD was not given a splash job over an assembled tractor. The base castings were all assembled and when I was ready to paint I striped the sides of the motor, trans and rearend that are almost hiddon behind the frame rails, painted the inside of the frame rails, painted the outside of the final drives and the inside of the rear wheels. After the paint was given a few minutes to tack we assembled those parts along with the front pedistol. The rear fenders were also installed and that part of the tractor was painted as a unit. The fuel tank, hood, cowl, tool box, shutters, front wheels and quite a few smaller parts were painted later after the base was rolled out of the booth. The paint job does not look thin, as a matter of fact it looks almost too thick on the sheetmetal with 3 coats. Considering that I used only one half of my finishing materials here is the rundown of the cost to paint the tractor.
1 quart of PPG Omni epoxy primer and hardner, $25
1/2 of 1 gallon MTK OMNI, hardener, reducer $60
Total material outlay $85I have a little assembly work to complete and am waiting on decals. I will post some pictures when it is complete. This is why some of us are allways touting the use of good paint, or at least the "economy" automotive grade paint and HVLP equipment to apply it. It really does not cost much more to use it. Of course if you can still get Delstar or it's Dupount equal and use a regular high pressure outfit to apply it you can easily get $175-250 in paint materials to do the same job. Bored at work today and darned proud of the WD. I have the pictures in a few days.
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