paint job: Hazard

[silverdemon]

Good job silverdemon. Now you've had some practice, pick some faster drying paint for next time
I mostly use acrylics. They have good opacity (covering power), work well on metal/plastic and dry fast so mistakes are quickly fixed. And they look great after a clear coat.

Thanks for the heads-up and next time 'round I WILL look at the drying time before buying paint! It's just that I thought: "well this shop is closest to my house and sells paint, I'll go there..."

Anyways, I've got an update for you all!

Painted the top panel last week. Took me two coats to make it cover really nice and then another two coats to do some touch-up stuff.

First a picture of the panel all by itself

And this is how it looks on the case

Note that I'm not ready yet, because there are two sides to the case

And finally I tried to make a shot in which it gets clear how nice this paint looks. It is really shiny, if it weren't black (but white or maybe grey) you could easily use it for a mirror! The picture is a bit blurry though, because I had to hold the panel in one hand and the camera in the other

If you look careful enough you can actually read some of the letters in the reflection...
oh and by the way: I didn't put any clear-coat on this panel, it's just the paint

That's all for now. Next up is the last side-panel which will hopefully be done a bit quicker than the other side-panel...

keep safe - silverdemon

[msmrx57]

Looks great!

[biggoofy]

Looks awesome, front and side panels line up nicely. Keep up the good work. I was just wondering - did you sand the pieces down before you started any paint?

[silverdemon]

Looks great!

Looks awesome, front and side panels line up nicely. Keep up the good work. I was just wondering - did you sand the pieces down before you started any paint?

Thanks!

Yeah I sanded the parts before painting, with 240 paper, then again with my Brillo-pad/scotch-sponge-thing because with 240 you can see the scratches...
Then I paint 1 layer, then use the sponge-thing again to roughen it up a bit and then another layer, and so on...

When I have to touch-up stuff I might grab the 240 paper again because that's a bit quicker, but I always finish with the scotch-stuff before painting

[silverdemon]

Hey there,

Since there were some questions about HOW I do the painting (and also because I know you like to see this stuff) I decided to make some 'in progress' pictures of the last panel. Explaining on the way what I do and how I do it.

First of, the panel as it was:

You can see there are some stickers on the top left and that there's a nasty dirty spot center-top

Those will have to go and be sanded until they're not visible anymore, so here comes the 240-grit sandpaper:

It's really 240

So after some sticker-carnage and about 5-10min of sanding we have a nice sanded smooth panel

but hold on! when you look close you can see that it's not smooth at all there are all kinds of scratches in there!

No problem though! out comes the spongy scotch-thing/Brillo-pad

After another 5-10 minutes of 'sanding' the panel is finished. But to show you the difference between the sanded part and the scotched part I made a picture during the scotching. Mind you, this pictures is edited (added a lot more contrast) to show you what I mean:

On the left part of the picture above I have only sanded the panel with my 240-grit paper and on the right part I also scotched it with my spongy-thing. A lot of difference, which you will see in the painting later on (the 240 'scratches' are actually visible through 2-3 layers of paint)

Next I painted the bottom part of the panel yellow, but as you know, the curing-time for the paint is 16 hours, so the picture of the first paint layer will come in the next update (probably somewhere next week)...

keep safe - silverdemon

[silverdemon]

Yellow paint update

So after the sanding in the previous update I put down the first layer of yellow paint

You can see there are still some imperfections in the paint because it doesn't cover that well in one layer

Also In the next picture you can see that I kinda forgot about the bottom edge of the panel... This will be out of view because it is at the bottom of the case, so one other layer will suffice

Then I did some more scotching with the spongy thing (light sanding) and then laid down another coat of yellow

Next I tried to make a nice close-up shot, but I failed miserably

After the second layer I was satisfied (enough) with how the panel looked, so I went on to do some masking for the next phase

In the next picture you can see that Sanex deospray only costs 5,99 euro for 3 spray cans!... However, that's not really important, You can also see I masked the stripes on the panel with special paper-like tape (I believe this is about the same stuff that comes in blue in the states...). The larger parts I masked with pieces of (news-) paper

I did some reeaall light sanding with the scotch-pad because I am afraid to 'damage' the edges of the tape and then I sprayed the first layer of black on. Those pictures will come in the next update though...

so that's it for now
keep safe - silverdemon

[silverdemon]

Hi there!

Well, this second side panel is going very very much quicker and better than the other (so far), I already finished the striping! took only two layers to cover nicely and I didn't mess up anything

On to the photo's
This is a picture of the first layer only.

When you look closely you can see some weird paint reaction near the edges of the masking tape... I guess this is a reaction between the paint and the glue of the tape that was still there after I tore of the pieces of tape (not sure though)

Not to worry though, I sanded the stripes with my scotch-pad and laid down another coat of black:

When you look close now you can see the edges are pretty sharp and the reaction-things have disappeared...

Another close-up shot to show you the shiny-ness of the black (yellow also reflects but is not nearly as shiny as the black)

So that's that for the striping, let me know what you think...

I've got one more picture of the prep-work for the top part of the panel. I masked the whole bottom part, the edge with the usual tape and the larger areas with newspaper (this time it is an actual newspaper)

I also sanded the top part again before I took this picture. I already sprayed the first layer of black on and (as expected) I doesn't cover 100% so one or two more layers are required. Pictures of that in the next update

keep safe - silverdemon

[silverdemon]

Right... on to the final update of this panel

Here's a picture of the panel after the first layer of black, if you look carefully enough you can see it doesn't cover 100% (as expected)

After the first layer I sanded the whole thing down again with the scotch-pad

A close-up of all the scratches I made with the sanding

Another close-up. Note that on this picture also the paint sort of reacts near the tape... Also note that I put another piece of tape on top to make sure the whole thing was tight

Ok, on to the results then...

Looks pretty ok if you ask me...

Ok, and one more show-off on the shiny-ness of the black paint... (you can even see the USB logo in the reflection!)

And this is how it looks on the case

The second side panel went very well, much better than the first side panel actually, which brings me to the following TOP-TIP:

When painting, always start with the part you care least about

I started of with the front and the side panel that are visible when the case sits on it's spot, but during the project I learned more and more how to work with the paint... meaning the parts I did last actually looked the best!
So if you ever paint parts of your case, start with the parts that are least visible, so you can experiment a bit with your paint...

Anyways, that's it for now... I'll post some final pictures sometime next week I think...

keep safe - silverdemon

[msmrx57]

Nice job! That's why they say practice, practice, practice.