I hate Yellow Paint...

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n3tjm

Papa Elf
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Well, it seems like I have no luck with yellow paint. It so hard getting it to look right. Today I tried some Krylon ColorMax paint. While all the other colors ranged from great to ok, the yellow was TERRIBLE. was very thin, and dripped from the nozzle as it sprayed. Anyone have any tips on a good yellow paint to use?
 
Well, it seems like I have no luck with yellow paint. It so hard getting it to look right. Today I tried some Krylon ColorMax paint. While all the other colors ranged from great to ok, the yellow was TERRIBLE. was very thin, and dripped from the nozzle as it sprayed. Anyone have any tips on a good yellow paint to use?
That's why they call it KRY-lon. 🤣
 
I feel your pain. I've tried a dozen different yellows over the years and could never find one I liked from Krylon or Rusto. I ended up using Tamiya brand for a while but that gets expensive quick as it typically takes two cans to do something like a Bertha.

When I rebuilt my Bertha last time I took a chance and tried Ace brand Safety Yellow. This was shot over flat white SEM primer. Two coats and it looked awesome. I've been moving to Ace brand paints for as much as I can. I really like their stuff but the colors are limited. I've used their Black, White, Safety Red, Yellow and Orange and the paint goes on great and dries hard but it does take a full day before you can handle it and several more before it's cured. I'm OK with the wait as I've dropped rockets and and haven't hurt the paint.

Here is the Bertha with Safety Yellow. https://www.acehardware.com/departments/paint-and-supplies/spray-paint/general-purpose/1010107

image7.jpeg
 
Montana Gold. Once coat coverage. Never any disappointments.

Or lacquer model paints.

Or an airbrush if the project is small enough (most LP projects).

If you're dead set on using rattle can enamel, flat white primer and light, easy coats of the top color coat.
 
I think the Rusto 2X Sun Yellow looks anemic - but I like the Marigold. That's what I used for my upscale Vigilante and the various sounding rocket Terrier/Talos/Nike yellow fins.
 
I feel your pain. I've tried a dozen different yellows over the years and could never find one I liked from Krylon or Rusto. I ended up using Tamiya brand for a while but that gets expensive quick as it typically takes two cans to do something like a Bertha.

When I rebuilt my Bertha last time I took a chance and tried Ace brand Safety Yellow. This was shot over flat white SEM primer. Two coats and it looked awesome. I've been moving to Ace brand paints for as much as I can. I really like their stuff but the colors are limited. I've used their Black, White, Safety Red, Yellow and Orange and the paint goes on great and dries hard but it does take a full day before you can handle it and several more before it's cured. I'm OK with the wait as I've dropped rockets and and haven't hurt the paint.

Here is the Bertha with Safety Yellow. https://www.acehardware.com/departments/paint-and-supplies/spray-paint/general-purpose/1010107

View attachment 574882
That looks great
 
This was Rusto 2x Golden Sunset. No issues (other than some self-inflicted stupidity):View attachment 574875

Golden Sunset happens to be the closest existing spray can color match to Monokote Cub Yellow. So you can do a BT in Monokote for strength and light weight and do details where that wouldn't work in paint. Which is awesome, because Goblins all need to be Cub Yellow.
 
everyone here feel your pain, because we have all been through it, not just with yellow but most paints. I use Duplicolor, but haven't painted a rocket in quite some time. Sounds like a bad nozzle? Anyway hope it works out for you
 
everyone here feel your pain, because we have all been through it, not just with yellow but most paints. I use Duplicolor, but haven't painted a rocket in quite some time. Sounds like a bad nozzle? Anyway hope it works out for you
I've never had an issue with yellow paint. Rusto 2x and it turns out beautiful.
 

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Rusto 2X Sun Yellow did me right...

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Loop Colors yellow is great if you don't mind a satin finish. This is 2 coats with no primer. Each coat dried in less than 30 minutes. Loop is meant for Graffiti Artists but it's my favorite rocket paint. I recommend white primer, this is an earlier build.
 

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I sometimes have good luck with standard Rusto rattlecan but I have more problems than I think I should. I bought a new can of yellow some months ago and sprayed my new Goblin with it. I had some runs and had to let it set a couple of weeks so I could sand them out and then spray again. I sprayed over white primer and it generally looks pretty good. It didn't cover as well as some other colors.

Some colors do cover better than others. Many years ago my daughter wanted her bedroom painted red so we bought paint that she picked out at Home Depot. I put 3 coats on the wall and it still didn't cover well, and I'm pretty good at house paint. I prefer Sherwin-Williams when I have a choice so we went to their store and picked out a different color. The salesman told us that red doesn't cover very well and is the worst color for coverage. My experience with Rusto is that red covers reasonably well but yellow and orange are not so good. I used to never use primer but now I do and most colors will go over white pretty well. I had trouble with some what primer so I got grey primer and the orange doesn't go over grey primer very well.DSC_3943r.jpg
 
IMHO, Krylon changed the formula for their paint, and it went from great to horrific. Additionally, on the Fusion paints they changed their paint nozzles so you can't adjust the shape/direction of the spray. I find the Fusion goes on more like candy colors, which look good over silver. I ditched the rattle can paint and went to Createx colors and a mini spray gun and never looked back.
 
My company makes custom spray paint (www.myperfectcolor.com) and we match hundreds of yellow colors. The problem with yellows is that the pigments are inherently translucent and have terrible hide (the pigments for bright colors in general have to be ground into extremely small particle sizes to achieve the brightness which leads to the inhernetly poor hide). Colors that are less bright will hide better. We add as much pigment as we are able, but you can only add so much before ruining the paint. I am actually dealing with this same problem on my Mach 1 Chimera 65. A white primer or 1-2 coats white paint is key. Any dark colors underneath the yellow will be very difficult to hide.

We are about to add a few new yellow pigments to our inventory. One of them costs us $600/gallon! But it is super bright and seems to offer good hide. We'll see how it helps in formulating better hiding yellows.

BTW, we recently added a new yellow metallic and it covered fairly well. I used it to paint a video housing for the rocket we 3D printed using black filament. I did one coat of a gray primer, one coat of white spray paint, one coat of yellow spray paint, and two coats of the metallic yellow and it looks awesome.
 
I used Krylon's gloss sun yellow on the 3" WAC Corporal, the Big Bertha, and the Super Big Bertha. It worked quite well on all of them. It did take a fair number of coats though. A few runs that were entirely my fault. My only real complaint was the color seems to have more than a hint of orange. For the BB and the SBB I'd have preferred yellow that was just...yellow.
 
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