Since we were having an unusually mild August weekend, I decided to tackle painting one of the Booster Covers this weekend. This was attempt number three. The first two times the masking failed miserably and I ended up having to strip the paint off, which is not a very fun task. Learning from my previous mistakes, I altered my plan to hopefully make the third time a charm. This go round I'm doing them one at a time as well, so here was the first one.
I used good old Elmer's glue in the bottom inset channels and the two top notched out areas. I cut a thin strip of regular masking tape for the horizontal striped areas near the bottom of the covers.
I put the glue in over a series of a few hours letting it dry a little and added more until each area that needed masking was completely covered. The glue will shrink a little which I especially wanted in the four vertical channels near the bottom. Here they are after drying overnight.
You don't want to let the glue get too dry or it will cause you major problems. I'd suggest only applying glue 16 - 20 hours before you're ready to paint. I applied on Saturday afternoon and painted Sunday morning. The top two holes will not dry to the core, which causes a bit of mess, but trust me, its better than letting it dry all the way.
These things are the hardest piece to paint in my opinion. There are so many angles and sides to them and the gloss always has some spots thats are a little rough from overspray on an adjacent side.
But once I had all the paint applied I let it set for an hour and then began peeling off the masking . The two masking taped stripes came off easily, especially after I scored them with an exacto knife. The four bottom vertical channels were a little tougher to get. I scored each side of the channel a little on small side and pealed out the glue. It came out fairly easily leaving a just a little trace in each channel. The real hard part here was using an exacto knife to remove the excess paint along each ridge. You can tell wich direction the paint will want you to trim based on trial and error. Then its just taking it nice and easy along the perimeter of the channel. Mine came out ok, one channel messed up a little along one side but it almost looks like weathering chips so I was ok with it.
The top two deep cutouts went about the same way. I scored the paint with the exacto and pulled out the dry portion of the glue. Then I used paper towels and q-tips to remove the still wet glue at the bottom of each hole. There will be some mess here, but if you go slow it will be minimal. Once that was done I used the exacto to carefully cut the excess paint along the edge of the hole. A slow steady hand is definitely key.
Once I had removed all the masking, cleaning everything up as best I could, I did some light wet sanding on a few blemished areas of the covers, Then I rinsed the whole thing off and let it dry for about 15 minutes. Next I applied 2-3 more clear coats over the whole piece. I've found this helps cement the edges of the paint where the masked areas were. Without it the paint there would chip away pretty quick. I did the same thing on my coin slots. You can't even tell there's clear over the bare aluminum areas. The only reason I did 2-3 coast was because of the aforementioned inclination of these particular parts being hard to get an even clear coat on. One would be enough, if you can get it in one. Even with all that process the top of my cover has a bit of a rough patch in the clear coat. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get it any better though. I may decide to rig up some sort of card board mask to help me shoot only the top with clear. One thing I've learned through all my painting is that it will never be perfect. These parts almost tell you where you're going to have to weather them. Once you do, these little imperfections will just add to the character.
