Painting the B

Bought my paint at a farm store, 29.99 a gallon. This is the air cleaner off my M shot with a rattle can. It looks good, but I also spent 5 hours hand sanding, primering, sanding again, primering again, sanding again. I use rust oleum primer, it worked real good. ALL primer needs at least 1-2 hours to be dry enough to not get little peices of primer balled up in the sandpaper and leave little scratches. I guess it all depepnds on how you want it to look. the guy helping me has been a paint and body man for over 40 years. this is the info he gave me if I want it to look good, not show quality, just to look good. I painted this about a week ago, so the paint is still a little soft, even though the date says 2004.
Jim

You can hold off on a lot of paint until you have it running, but you might think about about cleaning up some of the larger parts while they're off the tractor and mix up a small batch of primer and shoot them. It'll be good practice, and you would only need to degrease and scuff it a little as prep for your color coats.

I offer the idea for the practice in shooting the primer, learning how to sdet up your gun, how to flow it on, and how to clean up your gun. I shot a whole tractor that way before I ever shot any color.

When I can afford it, I take the big pieces (rims, sheet metal, things with lots of crannies) to a sandblaster and let him work his magic. When I am poor (like now) it is stripper and wire wheel time. I have found that a little stripper sure makes the paint come off a thousand times easier. I tried spraying stripper and then hitting it with a pressure washer. Worked pretty darn good. The touch up or hard areas is done with a wire wheel. Make sure you are using a mask, it can get nasty wire wheeling. I have a tendancy to wire wheel even before it is running since it is essentially free to do that. I don't put top coat on until it is running. I will hit it with primer so it doesn't flash rust on me. I found that the most reasonably priced wire wheels are from harbor freight on special. I just picked up a couple for $3 a piece instead of $6. If you want a copy of the ad let me know.

I have a couple of sprayers (not hlvp so I cam't speak for them), but I have found that my touch up gun ($9.99 special from Harbor Freight) has worked the best. My compressor won't handle hlvp so I am stuck using the suckem type. It allows control of air volume, paint volume and spray width.

In terms of thinning paint, it takes a little trial and error. Start with what ever the can recommends. It all depends on what size tip your gun has (the smaller the tip the thinner it would have to be). I usually mix it up so that it drips off the end of my stir stick and doesn't make a spash up like water does when it drips into a pool of water. Sometimes I find that the stuff is still too thick and so I add just a smidgen more since it doesn't take much to change the viscosity.

One thing I learned was that trying it on some scrap metal is well worth the wasted paint. I also shot all my cast metal first since that is much more forgiving compared to the sheetmetal. Granted my sheetmetal didn't come out quite as well as I had hoped, but it was a lot better than if I had started with it. Also make sure to put on thin layers. Thick layers will give you goopy, runny uggly paint jobs and you then get to redo it, which I hate.

Your experienced friend Jim!

Lanse, please read what In-too-deep said several times. 10 years from now you will be glad you did.

Have you got it unstuck yet?

Good luck.

Dave