Those of you who were following the weather this week will know that Thursday 3/11 and Friday 3/12 were both beautiful and uncharacteristically sunny, warm days in New England, and I'd happened to have reserved them for vacation time, so Wednesday night I started staging my garage space in order to to capitalize on the anticipated favorable conditions.
(A note here: this benevolent weather ... others wouold have been planning some golf, or a walk in the woods. Maybe a trip down to the coast. Me? My pulse was racing to take advantabe of relative warmth, low humidity and direct sunlight to get some paint/coatings applied.)
First off, I shot the struts housings and the SC's Fuchs center caps* in epoxy primer. For this and the top coat I used my small HF touch-up gun; what a useful little fellow it is for such work.
I'd actually stopped by HF the day before to pick up some paint strainers. I have to say, these stores really are a useful resource; yes, some of the stuff is nasty but a good percentage of it offers real value if you are clear-eyed with your expectations. One product line I hadn't seen before is "good/better/best" in their automotive paint guns. The ones I have are those which are silly cheap, like $25-35, fine for the component refinishing work I do, where the stakes are relatively low. While they still sell those like mine, their new guns are priced at something like $150 for "better" and $300 "best", and of course, you could get those for 20% less with "the coupon". Chances are, they're pretty good, although I'd look for reviews somewhere like garagejournal.com. Good paint is so expensive that if I were about to do a big job I'd not want to take any risks so would likely just go buy a SATA gun. But I will not be painting whole cars and I should aim to do less painting, not more, just from a personal health perspective.
Later Thursday morning I mixed up a cupfull of NASON (formerly DuPont) single stage urethane (8 parts color, 2 parts activator, 1 part hardener) and sprayed the struts housing and those four center caps.
*
"Gloss black center caps?", those gathered gasped. Yes. My four caps were three different shades of faded orginal anodizing. So I should have painted them satin black, no? Well, my SC's Fuchs were completely painted when the original owner had some remedial paint and body done in 2010. So the rims are painted silver, the centers black and the whole things gloss-cleared.
They would likely create some curled upper lips from the concours crowd, and some day, I'll strip them and have a professional restore the wheels properly. But in the meantime, only the cognoscenti would know they're "incorrect" and they look fine. And now the center caps match.
best, John