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!