Today Mel was at school and Max out to dinner with grandpa so I had time to tinker around with the finish. I must say I m in desperate need of a new HVLP! You get what you pay for so I shouldn't complain! With that said it's obvious I had troubles applying my lacquer. I used to be an excellent finisher and now that I've been working at this hack job for over 3 years I feel like I'm loosing my patience and attention to detail! Sad but true. I also changed products and I'm not happy with it! Mohawk sucks. Again, I bought it out of sheer laziness in SF because I was there and didn't want to wait until the weekend to go to Dunn Edwards. Lesson RE-learned! Ridiculous.
Enough whining, I wet sanded and wet sanded and wet sanded some more. Then I mixed up some finish and gave it a final coat! No matter what you do and how much retarder you use, shooting lacquer at 96°F is a nightmare. And that at 6pm.
Next will be a final sanding with 800 and a coat or two of wipe on poly. this will hopefully give it that thin patina finish I like. It worked on the sample but you never know! Finishing has been a pain so far.
The hardware also came today which makes me want to get this thing ready for assembly even more! The handle will look great and I think I'll use the white piping with black grill cloth instead of the black piping. Spook, need 8 feet of black piping?
Anyway, here's the progress:
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| Bad lacquer + bad gun = crappy finish. No thinning recommended from the factory. And they call this matte. Check the sheen in the last picture. Matte? That's insane. |
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| Time for wet sanding... |
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| ...wet sanding with mineral spirits. |
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| Dried off and ready for next coat. |
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| Second to last coat. |
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| Same thing different angle... |
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| Piping, feet, jack, handle and grill cloth came today. Hopefully this will be the end of it soon! |
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| Just a picture with the handle on top. Oh and I was right about the 3/16" solid I glued to the face and back! Do you see a glue edge on the face anywhere? |
