Hey there, hi there, ho there. It’s getting a little late, and the fumes are getting to me, so I apologize if I get a little weird on you. The good news is I started painting Moon Patrol! The bad news is that I gaffed it up pretty good. Here’s how it went down…

I bought my stencils from prOk aka Brian aka OleszakCreative.com. I couldn’t be happier with them. I was going to use paint codes I found on his site, but for some reason (cuz they suck?) my Home Depot couldn’t use them. I ended up grabbing the colors from a pic I took of the cabinet after I peeled off the old Aliens sticker.

I used the eyedropper in photoshop to grab the colors and printed them out in squares for them to match. This can’t possibly be very accurate but was the only way I could get them close, and they seem to match pretty good from what I can tell so far. The paint I got was semi-gloss latex enamel, and I also picked up Kilz-2 primer and a HVLP spray gun.

OK…so I had everything ready to go. I thinned the paint pretty good with water until it tasted just right, and still had a tough time getting it to come out of the sprayer well. I kept messing with it and it just didn’t seem right. I finally got it to come out somewhat decent but the height of the spray area was pretty small. Here it is after the primer:

I did 2 coats of primer. If I didn’t have problems with my shiny new spray gun, I probably could have done just one. I started the blue next, and did a couple of coats, sanding in between with 220 grit paper, and it just didn’t look right. It looked a bit stripey. I had a feeling it was my gun, so I poked around on the interweb for a while, and finally found the problem. An HVLP gun is designed to be used with a compressor that has a large tank. My measley 6 gallon compressor wouldn’t cut it. I cleaned up the gun and brought it back to Home Depot, not telling them that I painted all day with it. I bought a standard duty gun, and the difference was night and day. It worked about a million times better than the other one with my tiny compressor. After doing another coat of blue with the correct gun, it looked like this:

The finish looked awesome, and I was psyched. I moved on to the stencils. Here is the dark blue after being taped in place:

After the mask is peeled:

After I masked off the rest with tape and paper:

And finally after painting 2 coats and peeling the stencil off:

The stencil worked great, and it looked very cool. It was realy starting to look like a Moon Patrol again, and the excitement of seeing it finished probably lead to what came next.

OK…so here it is with the stencil for the yellow on, ready for paint:

I did a single light coat of yellow, and it looked pretty good. You are supposed to wait 4 hours between coats with this paint. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I only waited about 2.5. By this time, it was getting a little colder outside and was dark. I did the 2nd coat, and it looked good. Went back inside for a few hours, and went back in the garage to checkout my handy work.

I had drips! Drips everywhere. As Q*bert would say, @!#?@!

I’m not sure what caused the drips. I guess maybe that last coat was too heavy, or I didn’t wait long enough, or someone is out to get me. Not every piece that is cutout had drips…if I had to give a number, I’d say 50% of the individual cutout shapes had drips and the other half did not. I was going to try to sand them off, but figured that would be difficlut and mess up the stencil. I think I found a good solution to this, but won’t know until it’s all done.

I tested with some scrap pieces of the vinyl from the first color on the board that I was using to test my spray gun. I stuck it down good, and went at the areas along it’s edges with Goof Off. I was very careful to not rub too hard near the edges of the vinyl, but just enough to get the paint off, down to bare wood. I peeled the vinyl off and it left all the paint under it in tact. So, I have to do that to every piece on the stencil that has severe drippage. I masked off every individual cutout that didn’t have drips:

Here is a closeup of how it looks with all the paint removed:

While it may look like total crap around the edges of the stencil, it’s still stuck down well and the inside is clean and smooth. I have a lot of work to do to get it all like this. When I’m done, I’m going to paint these spots again, with primer, the base coat, and finally yellow. I could just use yellow on the bare wood, but I’m concerned that the letters masked off won’t match these fixed ones.

I have a truckload of Goof Off, rags, and have sealed every window and door tight so the outside air doesn’t get in. Wish me luck!

TO BE CONTINUED