Micro Cab: Slap Some Paint On It!
I’ll just put this out here right now; I have zero patience for painting. I’m too used to being able to do precise lines and colors in the digital realm in moments versus applying it in the physical, and having it come out meh. Painting always looks so easy on home shows where they just mask a line, paint, and peel the tape off to perfection. I watch so many car shows with these guys painting absurdly complicated designs and it looks so easy in the 5 minutes dedicated to that part of the build. I’m not so naive as to think that’s all there is to it, that hours and hours of prep work wasn’t required. The problem is, I don’t want to spend hours and hours doing it! As soon as I laid down my base coat of blue, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy with the end result.
Mistake #1 was I didn’t spray the paint, I used a foam roller. It went on easy enough and I was more than happy with the color. It’s that it created a texture rather than a perfectly flat paint surface. I proceeded to mask off all the areas needed to lay down the white paint using good ol’ blue painters tape, thinking that would give me crisp, clean lines. When I peeled it up, I noticed there was some minor bleed through of white onto blue. This was because of the textured surface. I also noticed that since it’s latex paint, there was also layer build up between the two colors. Again, if I’d sprayed it on, I don’t believe the build up would have been so easily noticeable to the touch. And so, I pressed on with laying down the black stripes.
When I peeled up the tape to reveal the finished look, I wasn’t too happy. The black bled through even more than the white, creating fuzzy lines instead of nice clean razor sharp stripes. Even from a distance it was noticeable, so something had to be done. Time to try out my hand at using a small brush and essentially pinstriping!
As you can see, I was able to do a nice job of cleaning up the lines. By no means perfect, but acceptable to me. Yo can also see just how much texture using a roller puts down. Yikes. There’s no chance in hell I’ll ever get a mirror surface out of that, no matter how much clear I put on! Again this is from my assuming back in the day that pinball manufacturers rolled the base paint onto the cabinet rather than spray. They also probably didn’t use latex but lead based paint.
Once I had the clean-up done, I wanted to get a better idea of how this all would come together, so I stuck on the 3D printed coin door, printed out what I wanted the logo on the side of the cabinet to look like and stuck that on, and in general liked what I saw. Now it happened to be a warm day, and after I was done taking this photo I put the coin door down flat on a wooden box. I stepped away for about 45 minutes only to find the coin door had warped up almost an inch, right where one of the seems of the assembled door was glued together. There’s no way the sun should have melted it in such a manner, and my best guess is it had to do with the texture spray I used to make it black. So I used a heat gun to flatten it back down as best I could, and let it cool. It seemed fine, I sprayed some more paint on it to cover the marks made flattening it out, and left it on a cool flat surface for 2 days. Next time I went to pick it up, this happened…
Well, shit.
The paint and heat must have reacted with the plastic, glue, and filler, totally weakening it so that it just snapped in half along the seem. It took 24 hours to 3D print this thing, so I was not going to have my friend do another. As of this writing, our solution is to use the CNC machine to cut a door out of wood and then I’ll spray that. Fingers crossed that works because this did look pretty awesome, even without the red coin inserts for the windows.
Next it was time to deal with the side cabinet art. After looking at some YouTube videos, we found a method of transferring an image over. Essentially you take a sheet of labels, peel all of them off, and use the waxy paper for printing with a laser printer. Whatever surface you want that transferred to, you put down a substance of your choice on it, put the paper printed side down, let it dry, peel the paper and the image is there. Or at least in theory. Methods described in the video ranged from using clear coat, to acetone, to Elmer’s White glue. The only problem is, you can’t print white and that was the look I needed. Time to make a stencil.
Because I got it into my head that rolling paint was now bad, and that the area that needed paint was so small, I decided to use a brush to apply the white. Mistake #2. Seriously, this all just stems from my not wanting to spray the paint because that would mean cleaning the gun, and this would surely be okay, right?
Uh, wrong.
I didn’t need clean crisp lines, because black would be bordering everything. The issue became that you cannot brush an even, smooth surface. And once more, there was bleeding that went beyond what I even felt was acceptable. Knowing that the transfer would need a smoother surface than this, I resorted to sanding it all down a bit, taking out some of the lumps that had resulted. And lemme tell ya, latex paint doesn’t just flake off. Oi.
But whatever, it’s all one grand experiment anyway. Live and learn. By this point the bolt holes for the legs got drilled in, so it was time to see what this thing looked like up on its feet.
Well hey, those legs look rather nice! And as a bonus, they covered up some of the nastier edges I had with the white. Maybe this would work after all? Feeling emboldened, it was time to press on with this image transfer.
My buddy, who to his credit is a perfectionist, wanted to do a whole series of tests with different mediums, dry times, and thicknesses to see what would work best. Remember at the start when i wrote I have zero patience? We did a test using varathane and one using Elmer’s Glue. We waited 90 minutes, and the glue version came out rather nice while the varathane hadn’t come close to drying yet. I was like, glue it is! Let’s just go for it!
So I put down a layer of glue across the entire area, pressed the laser printed paper into it, and let it sit. After an hour I peeled the paper back to reveal this…
By and large I found it acceptable, but it was a far cry from perfect. For starters, the glue wrinkled the waxy paper and then collected, leaving a white haze with obvious bumps. I chipped away at those with my fingernails and figured clear coat would hide a lot of it too. It wasn’t great, but screw it, do the other side! I used a little less glue, only put it where the image would transfer so as to avoid the bumps, and an hour later got this…
Holy crap, that’s terrible!
I mean I can live with a lot, but no way in hell am I going to spray clear over that. Turns out I didn’t use enough glue, so in the seconds I had between spreading it and putting down the paper, it dried. That cause a lot of the black to not transfer, thus giving me the mess you see here.
So I’ll be sanding that off and painting the sides blue again. I’m then going to spray (finally learning a lesson here?) clear coat on everything. I’ll figure out a solution for the logo later. Leaning towards making a static cling image by making a custom one through Fat Head or something. They can actually print white and black, and it’ll be super crisp. It’s simply a matter of cost, one I don’t feel like ponying up for at the moment.
Not when there’s wiring to do!
And that’s what the next post will be about. As of now, the prep work for wiring has all been done, so I am ever so close to actually being finished. Hurray! So why does it still feel so far off? Until then…