I am going to be painting my boat white here pretty soon....i will be rooting through this project thread for any tips or tricks i may be able to pick up. do you have any that you would like to add?
Hi Brad,
You know, what I found in my little adventure is that no matter how many different folks you ask, you're gonna get that many different answer as well. I went from the extreme of folks telling me that if I don't spend $600 per gallon of clear, it was gonna look like trash to, you gotta have a $600 spray gun for your base coat and another separate (but equally expensive) gun just for your clear.
I did neither. I researched all the different paints and watched mulitiple boards and ended up over with Barry Kive at SPI. His paints are very reasonably priced (about $130 a gallon for clear), easy to spray and the product appears to be fantastic. In case you think his might be a cheapy paint, many magazine cover cars and all the Year One show cars have been painted with SPI. The only limitation is that you don't have many colors to chose from at this time. From what I was told by my jobber, many of his custom folks mix their own by buying concentrate from places like House of Kolor and then use the Intercoat clear and mix their own shades.
With that said, if your lookin for white, reds, blues, oranges, yellows.......he's got you easily covered.
Other tips, I went with an Astro LVLP gun. It's a low pressure & low volume gun that doesnt put out much overspray at all and hardly uses any air. For schmucks like the most of us, this is a biggee as the other guns easily overwhelm our smaller compressors. Cost me something like $85. It's available in a 1.4 or a 1.8 nozzle. All paint companys are different but Barry pretty much recommends the 1.4 nozzle for everything but his primers. Just check your tech sheets for the paints you want to spray
For primers, I went with a varity of stuff (primarily PPG or their kissin cousins) and though I loved the PPG cuz that stuff went on like peanut butter and sanded off really easy, but, it was just too darn thick to shoot through that 1.4 nozzle. Omni (cheaper cousin of PPG) has a product called MP282 that you add a splash of reducer to and makes it super easy to spray with a 1.4 and fills the scratchs very well and sands super. With all that said, Barry also has some 2K primers and I'm sure if you talked to him he'd help you on tricks to make it more sprayable for a 1.4. I just hadn't discovered Barry yet.
I used SharkSkin overspray plastic for my masking. This stuff comes in a huge roll and is wide enough to completely cover the boat. It kinda clings to the boat like saranwrap and makes it much easier to do your masking if you're trying stripes or something. Another nice feature is this has to go on one way and is labeled "paint this side". Reason being is that it attracks the overspray like you can't believe and holds it there so you don't have the possibility of the overspray blowing off onto your wet 2nd or 3rd coat. If you put it on backwards the opposite is true from what folks that have made that mistake have told me.
The bad thing is that this stuff is as thin as saranwrap and I must have had some small holes in it as I now see after I have the clear buffed that there are two spots where I have some light bleedthrough of blue up on the deck. Not near my taping but in an area where there was just the plastic. It's very light and can only been seen in the shop and if your'e really looking for it. I'll mess with that next winter cuz nobody is ever going to see it but me. Must have had some very small holes or something in the plastic. No biggee
As Greg had mentioned above, Barry is the best. From what I understand he was the chief chemist at a couple of the big paint companys and decided to do it on his own with his son. The best thing is that he provides you his cell phone number in case you get into trouble. I was spraying my Viper blue and it started to craze on me in one spot. Instead of jumping off a bridge, I figured I'd try calling Barry but since it was a Sunday morning I kinda doubted that he answer. Not only did he answer but he must of spent 30 minutes talking to me about how "we" are going to fix this. Not only that but he was in a Home Depot at the time. He also told me to let him know a day in advance when I was going to spray the clear as he gets between 100 and 150 calls a day. He wanted to make sure he was off the phone so I could call him when I was ready to spray. He wanted to talk to me through how to not only set up the gun property to spray the clear but also wanted to be online with me after I made my first test pass to make sure I was doing it right. This stuff went on so nice that it's a crime that it's only $120 a gallon.
Needless to say, I'm now a huge Barry fan and have already swung Greg over there and I'm confident that you and your check book will be very happy with SPI.
Sorry for the SPI commercial but I got so many runarounds from the local jobbers on why thier paints are better than so & so's and that if you don't spend thousands of dollors on just the colors, you're going to have a disaster. I'm sure thier stuff is really nice but not in my budget.
There are so few family owned businesses anymore and when you find quality companies that customer service is still a priority like it is with SPI, Jet Boat Performance and Skagen Boats.....I will always prefer to do business with them and have yet to ever be disappointed.
Good luck and never hesitate to ping me if you have a question. I genuinely don't know what I'm doing but will gladly share what I did right or wrong. John
Here's the link to SPI......
http://www.southernpolyurethanes.com/homepage.htm
