The part of the project that I have been dreading has finally arrived upon me. I can no longer make up excuses like "oh, I need a right angle drill before I can paint" anymore. All I can do is bite my tongue, close my eyes, and jump head first into my paint cans. Literally.
As I've said many times before, the first layer of paint that needs to go on is the primer. It basically seals the wood, and preps it for the base color of paint (in my case, it's black). The first I had to do, aside from opening my paint gun, was make sure the viscosity of the paint was at an appropriate thickness. If it was too thick, the spray gun won't work properly, and I risk causing permanent damage to it. You test the viscosity using a nifty tool that they package with the paint gun. It's basically a little cup with a hole on the bottom. You dip it in the paint, and time how long it takes to empty out. If it takes too long, you have to thin it out with the appropriate thinner. Luckily, I didn't need to thin out the primer, as it was at just a thin enough viscosity to be used in the paint gun.
The next thing I had to deal with was finding a suitable location to paint. I ended up choosing the garage, because it was indoors. Being indoors meant that I didn't have to deal with the wind or other elements of Mother Nature's wrath, and it is one of the lowest traffic-areas in the house, meaning I wouldn't disturb anyone else in their day-to-day activities. So, using all the newspaper and cardboard boxes I could find in the house, I covered up as much of the garage floor as I could. Then, to deal with the guitar, I bought some clothesline and strung it from one side of the garage to the other and suspended the guitar over the newspaper platform in the middle.
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| The finished product. Looks pretty damn good if I say so myself! |
Operating the paint gun ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would. After turning it on and being surprised by how similar it sounds to a vacuum cleaner, operating it is simply a matter of pulling the trigger, and fiddling with the dial to control the amount of paint that comes out. So, all I had to do was paint.
Many thanks to my house-mate, Mike, for helping me out with the painting. He basically stood behind the guitar with a sheet of wood in order to catch whatever flecks of paint flew past the guitar. Otherwise, I'd have to explain to my land-lord why I decided to cover parts of the house in a new coat of paint. To protect himself, he wore an old sweater, and a skirt that he fashioned out of bubble-wrap. I ended up spraying 3 coats of primer about 1 hour apart from each other. Each coat went on like a charm, so I have to say that I'm ultimately incredibly satisfied with my purchase. The finished product was smooth and evenly-coated.
The day had gone off perfectly without a hitch, but knowing me and my luck, I had to screw it up somehow. What did I do this time, you ask? I realized I didn't have the proper means to clean out the primer from my paint gun. Primer, being slightly different from regular acrylic paints, can't be cleaned with just water. It needs either paint thinner, or even better, denatured alcohol (and before you ask, it's completely different from isopropyl alcohol).
Of course, I didn't have either of those. If I didn't properly clean out my gun though, I would again risk permanent damage to the gun, so I had to get some of those cleaners as quickly as possible. So, I hopped into my car and drove off to the nearest paint store as if I was re-enacting a race from Need for Speed: Underground.
30 panicked minutes later, I was back at home frantically cleaning out my spray-gun. I did the best that I could, but unfortunately, a lot of it had dried out by the time I got back. Hopefully it won't affect the finished product too much.
Thanks for reading!
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