Originally posted by Hospital_Rocket
Does anybody have any good ideas on how to effectively apply the flourescent paint sold by Krylon? The stuff seems more like colored Kilz than a finish paint. No matter what I do it comes out with a powdery finish that flakes off real easy. The bright yellow also seems to tend to separate into orange streaks.
So far the life of me, all I can think of is to load the airframe up, then sand as best possible, then cover with clear.
Any better ideas?
Anybody know of a flourescent paint that is not so hard to work with?
Buehler?
I use Rustoleum from Lowe's. The "powdery" finish is a probably unavoidable. The Rustoleum is "high visibility" which means rough finish, for better light dispersion. It does take gloss coat well and comes out nice. The Klingon Quantum Torpedo was done that way.
To make it stay on well I put it over white satin coat, which is on top of the primer. I put the satin on thick, and when the surface is dry, the fluourescent.
To make it even, I use lots of very light (like a dusting) coats. They dry so fast that I can put them on a minute or two apart. I turn the birds on a hand rotisserie and give, say, 12 sections to a 2" tube. By the time I get all the way around to the first again, it's ready for another coat. I figure the K.Q.T. took 6 to 8 turns/coats, took maybe half an hour, but with all that light spraying wasted a lot of paint, and so used 2/3 of a can. to do 16" of BT60 (1.6" OD).
The seperating into streaks sounds like what happens to metal finish when it's too thick. I've not had that happen due to the fluourescent itself. I *have* used so much satin mid-coat that it was still wet under the dry surface, and sagged. You could see the ridges and lumps where whole square inches sagged like bags under the eyes. The fluourescent surface coat cracked and the undercoat showed through, but the fluourescent color itself didn't separate, so I assume too heavy an undercoat isn't your problem.
I would definitely not use a metallic undercoat. That stuff is a booger to work with just on its own. Getting stuff to stick to it is a real problem. And unless your fluourescent is a highlight paint rather than a full coat, it'd be a waste of metal paint. It might be worth an experiment to lightly dust fluourescent over metal that's dried for at least a week, until it's almost but not quite coated, but I wouldn't try this on a bird without practicing at it (if it even worked).
