Foibles: Adventures of an Amateur Carriage Painter

Last summer, I struggled and struggled to put a great coat of paint on the carriage seat with a brush.  I was not successful.  Before I could finish, I would lose control of the "wet edge" on the brush, it would start to drag, and the job would be ruined.  I wiped off coat after coat of wet paint, and finally, with hot east winds howling and filling my exposed painting space with dirt, I gave up.

So, as it happened, I decided to try my unfamiliar paint gun on this unfortunate piece of furniture.  What you see is the result, which from where you're sitting, probably looks pretty good.  However, there's a story here!

In experimenting with my little touch up gun, I was unhappy with it's "fan" pattern, which looked more like an oversized dot instead of a fan.  So I pushed the air pressure way too hard, until the poor little creature produced a fan on my practice piece.  Satisfied, I shot a coat of paint on the seat and the result was an absolutely HIDEOUS mess!

So, like any good amateur...I panicked!  I wiped off all the wet paint, with a terry cloth rag and a bucket of paint solvent.  I dried the seat off, wiped it with a tack rag, adjusted my paint gun correctly, and proceeded to lay down this nice, shiny paint job...

...in a cloud of lint from the terry cloth rag!

And you guessed it...it all settled on my beautiful paint job!!!

Lesson:  If I wreck the paint job, wipe off all the wet paint, take the part out if possible, exhaust the air thoroughly, blow the paint booth out, spray the air with Dusteen, allow to dry.  Clean the part up thoroughly, BLOW IT OFF WITH COMPRESSED AIR!!!  You can NOT believe how tenacious dust can be!  Bring it back in the sterilized paint booth, wipe with a tack rag and try again.  The seat is sitting on the bed in the spare room drying, awaiting another try a little later on.
 

On the happy side, this corner...

...and this corner, are one and the same.

The seat has had a full year to endure extreme changes of temperature and humidity, and the repairs I made to it last year have not suffered a single failure.

Yesterday, I was painting this wheel after a painstaking cleaning process of EVERYTHING involved, and nearly had the back side of the wheel painted when it decided to spin itself off the stand!

Shocked, by some superhuman move, my left hand slapped down on the taped rubber tire as the wheel hit the floor, and I held it upright so the wet paint never contacted the floor!  So!  Wheel in one hand, paint gun in the other, how do I lift this fairly large, wet wheel back onto the stand!

DO NOT PANIC.  I grabbed the paint gun between my knees, and managed to raise the wet wheel back up onto the stand with the flats of my hands, somehow not dropping it, and not touching the paint!

The only damage experienced was where spoke and felloe skipped off the end of the stand, and the damage is on the back side.  After the seat experience, I decided to just calmly finish painting (the wheel came out creamy!), sand and touch up the little spots on the second coat.

So, as the old saying goes..."Calm seas do not a skilled mariner make."  A few good lessons are now starting pay off as the pile of finished parts grows!

Houston, We Have...Yellow Things!

Please forgive my lack of enthusiasm, but...

OMIGAWD!!!  I ACTUALLY PAINTED SOMETHING!!!
YIKES!  YIPPEE!!!  YAHOO!!!

And it's real shiny and pretty!

Ahem...we now return to our regular programming...









A Much Needed Shot of Encouragement  

 While my enthusiasm for the project has been falling off badly as I finish-sand the last items...the wheels...my precious husband has spent the last week or so building me a painting booth inside the shop.

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He is visually impaired, with advanced macular degeneration but his cleverness cannot be defeated.  He produced this gorgeous clean room, which includes intake and exhaust fans, and a zippered door (repurposed from a Shelter Logic building) over the period of about a week and a half.

And then he was done.

And then I had to paint




And I don't mind telling you, the idea of "shifting gears" into paint mode was about as appealing as going to my own execution.  That's how tired I've gotten of the project.  But quite frankly, I've no time to waste.  I can't commandeer this space forever, and I have only about 2-3 months at most to get this thing painted.

So I Got Started...

 With one exception, the surfaces on this carriage are all fairly narrow, with some of them hard to reach with a full sized gun, so I pulled out this handy little Badger detail gun, which I'd purchased unused/new on eBay a couple years ago.    It has an 8 oz cup, and the medium sized needle and tip are miniscule compared to a relatively fine tip on the big production guns.

I mixed my paint.  Since I am very paint challenged, knowledge wise, I've opted to use the old style brushable/sprayable enamel.  Modern auto type catalyzed paints are way beyond my ken, so I just slog along.  I wanted to use Schwartz buggy paint, which I know to be wonderfully shiny.  Their yellows are too mustard-y for me, so I experimented mixing white and yellow and came up with a shade I liked.

Then I had to thin it.  I used Naptha, which is a little faster drying than mineral spirits/paint thinner.  I thinned it to run through a Ford #4 viscometer in about 28 seconds.  I think 25 seconds may be a little better for the wee gun.  Modern paints tell you EXACTLY how to thin.  Old style paints are strictly seat-of-the-paints.  But one of the advantages of using them is that you can brush a section requiring touch up in the future.  I mixed 1 1/2 gallons of yellow, and put it up in quart cans, with one quart for thinning in a gallon can.

I didn't try this product on the first parts in the brand new paint booth, but I did after opening the booth to take out the first parts.

Would you believe, I left that zippered door open for ten minutes to remove the parts, and no less than three flies violated my no-fly-zone air space!

Things didn't go well for those flies.

Finally the moment of truth arrived and dreading a crappy outcome, I actually couldn't believe what a beautiful, shiny coat of enamel that little gun laid down on my carefully prepared surfaces!

Badger does not make the detail gun any longer, but DeVilbiss makes a carbon copy of it.

For the two bolsters and the singletree, I used about 4 ounces of paint, half the volume of the paint cup.

These parts have been hung carefully to cure while I paint more parts.  Everything will have to be delicately wet sanded between coats of paint, and the paint must be thoroughly dry before sanding.  With luck I should be finished sanding the second wheel this afternoon, so that two wheels can go in the booth.  I will paint everything, including wheels, body and seat, before we have to move the turntable jig in for the gear and shafts, as once that big rig is in the booth, it's not coming back out until the job is done.

Some Thoughts on All This Work...

This restoration has been going on for a full year now, and will creep on for several more months.  Hobbies sometimes have to stand in line for time share.

The question is, is all the finish work worth it?

Here is the bolster which is pictured at the top of this post, in its original condition.

Here it is stripped, in all its oaken glory.  Oak has very prominent grain and if that's what you want to show through your paint, that's fine.  But if you are looking for the "lacquered music box" look, you have to go through the sequences of surface preparation that have been outlined in this blog or you will see every bit of grain under the paint, that you see in the bare wood.

Color coats are VERY unforgiving.  All the work of the last year has led up to that shiny bolster in the top picture.

I don't know just how well this comparison is going to come out - you might want to double click on the image for detail.  This is the upper half of the left hand bolster, the one that got a half inch thick addition glued to the top to make it the same height as the right hand bolster.  This is the outer surface, the one that will show..

...versus the inner surface, which won't show.  I did not do all the grain filling on this side, which will be directly underneath the carriage body, facing inboard.  The addition on the top of the bolster is quite clearly visible.

So, y'know, I could have been done with the project months ago, if the finish didn't matter that much to me.  But it does.  It's a personal best.

And today, I can happily say that as many times as I've stopped myself from saying, "that's good enough," it's been worth every minute.