Advice on spray gun paints

I am almost ready to paint my Ultimate Darkstar rebuild after the mains failed to open last year.
I puchased a Sprayit LVLP gravity gun kit with 1.0 1.3 & 1.7 tips. I have a 3.5 hp 10 gallon compressor that will handle 5cfm at 30-40 psi as the gun recommends. I have never done this before. I have followed a few threads on spray gun painting and was thinking about this. Do the primer with rattle can ( duplicolor high build) as I dont feel I have a large enough tip to apply primer. I was thinking about trying Duplicolor paint shop base coat jet black, then use Duplicolor paint shop clear coat and add a bit of .004 metal flake to it & then just clear coat over top. I really want a subtle metal flake appearance but not crowd the base coat.
I hear Duplicolor Paint shop is easy to work with and requires no reducer. It is also easily available to me.It is considered a lacquer paint. What are the pro's & cons of Lacquer vs enamel for a greenhorn like myself?
Does this sound like a good plan for a first try?

Its what I used for my first time. Easy to work with, Drys fast and all you need to do is put it in your gun. No mixing or reducing required. The only downside I would say is that you need more coats than enamel because its thin. I would also highly recommend starting out on a different small rocket that doesn't mean as much or just a scrap piece of wood to get your movement down and just overall used to how the gun works. FYI they also sell their primer in 32oz cans thats suitable for the guns.

Ok Ill ask about the primer too see if I can spray it with my largest tip. I plan to practice my technique & spray adjustments on large cardboard sheets before I paint the Darkstar.
How is it for durability?.

glenbo said:

Ok Ill ask about the primer too see if I can spray it with my largest tip. I plan to practice my technique & spray adjustments on large cardboard sheets before I paint the Darkstar.
How is it for durability?.

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Its not as strong as enamel and like I said before it's thin. Once you start to build up the layers you will be fine. Ive had no problems with it so far.

I've used the Paint Shop paints before... good stuff. I used a Preval aerosol small sprayer for LPR birds.

Instead of adding metal flake to the clear, you can buy "metallic clear" (BSP301) in the Paint Shop line. I used it on a number of rockets with great results, but over the years my can of it went bad and I need to buy a new can. You can do a light overspray with this on top of your black, then overcoat with regular clear.

On a larger project you can do some cool effects with it, varying the amount of the metallic clear in different areas to create patterns or whatnot on different regions of the rocket.

Marc

I'm going to leave your specific "Paint" type question alone.
But did want to suggest the purchase of a Detailing spray gun over the use of a full size gun for Hobby rocketry use. These detail guns can be had very inexpensively from Harbor Freight and do a Fantastic job on Model, MPR and HPR size models without as much mixing and left over paint.
Will work perfectly with the compressor you already have.

Micromeister said:

I'm going to leave your specific "Paint" type question alone.
But did want to suggest the purchase of a Detailing spray gun over the use of a full size gun for Hobby rocketry use. These detail guns can be had very inexpensively from Harbor Freight and do a Fantastic job on Model, MPR and HPR size models without as much mixing and left over paint.
Will work perfectly with the compressor you already have.

Click to expand...

Oh yes I hadn't even caught on to that. I use a $12 HVLP gun and it works perfectly!!

Ok so Im gonna make it easy on myself. Got the duplicolor jet black the metalic clear and clearcoat. From I read the metalic clear is more of a pearl effect than metalic. For primer I bought Duplicolor high fill rattle cans. I was debating about buying a detailing gun instead but I went with the kit that had the different spray tips. This gun is also LVLP not HVLP so I should waste less paint from overspray. Thanks for the advice. Now I just have to wait for warmer weather to paint.