1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

I picked up my [hopefully] last 2 quarts of primer and I have the entire evening with no plans so if all goes as planned, the trailer will be finished and the hull will have a full coat of primer. I feel kind of bad, though. I had bought a quart of red paint and a quart of white paint and after figuring coverage and how much I needed, I decided that I was going to buy a gallon of each instead. I went back to Lowes to exchange the white and red for 2 quarts of primer and in my rush this morning, I grabbed the wrong can of white paint. I accidentally returned my "test" can of paint (I was testing with white before I read WOG's thread stating that I should use red as my base). Lowes got back a full quart of "custom" colored PINK instead of white! Whoops! I called Lowes and explained the mishap to them and offered to bring the can I had intended to exchange, but they said not to worry about it.

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

The trailer is ready for paint and the hull will get its final coat of primer tomorrow. Now that it's all a uniform color, I can say that I am really pleased with how well I fixed the PO's "repairs". They're nowhere near perfect, but they are better than I had expected and far better than they were before. I'm really excited to see how it's going to look with paint and finally out of the garage. I do think I need to try and make more room in the garage before I shoot the color, though. It was a very tight fit on one side and I had to fight to keep the plastic away from the hull. I had a few issues with my gun today. I guess I didn't clean it thoroughly enough and it splattered the primer a bit, but I'm glad it happened on the primer coat and not the color coat. Now I know to better clean the gun! Anyway, on to the pictures...

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

No new update here. I forgot today was my mothers birthday so we took her and my dad out to dinner. I mixed up my test color on a pint-sized scale and proceeded to mix it up into my gallon... and found out that I am short on blue. I will be out of town tomorrow and Sunday so it looks like I am going to be a few days behind my originally planned schedule.

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

The boat got its last coat of primer last night and will be ready for color (white) tonight. I didn't take any new pics since, well, it looks the same as the first coat and the 2nd coat was uneventful.

However, I think I learned a lesson last night. I spent a few hours mixing up my gallon of paint. I had the color PERFECT! I asked the wife over and over again and mixed it more and more. We were both 100% positive that it was the color maroon that we wanted. I painted test swatches on paper, craft sticks, and even some extra iron decor we had laying around. I'm not exaggerating when it was 100% what we wanted.

So with that said, I got up early this morning to throw down some color on the boat. I cracked open the can and gave it another mix, cut it down to a quart, added my hardener, mixed it some more, and got busy. When I first started spraying, I thought it looked a little brown, but I thought maybe it was the cloud cover or because it was still early light so I kept going. I finished the entire trailer and the wife came out to bring me some coffee and... "Why is it brown?!". CRAP!!!! It wasn't just my eyes! We had some people drop by to visit and I asked them as well and they both said it looked like it had brown in it. SIGH! I only mixed red and blue. No black, no white, or any other color. It shouldn't be brown, should it?! If I had wanted to have a brown boat/trailer, I wouldn't have painted it! HA!

Anyway, I think my lesson learned is to mix my paint up in natural light; in the light that the project will be seen in. I also learned that if something doesn't look right, STOP! If I had stopped after the first spray, I may have been able to correct the paint mix and not have to re-prime the trailer. My guess is that the artificial light inside the house showed the color in a different light, pardon the pun. Unless the color magically changes when it is dry, it looks like I have 3 quarts of wasted paint. I can't be too upset, though. This sort of [lack of] luck follows me around everywhere I go.

PS - Why did my paint end up looking brown? My base paint was safety red. The ONLY thing I added to it was thinned out blue artists oil. I then added the required hardener and acetone. My gun was 100% clean (I broke it down piece-by-piece last night and cleaned it).

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Not sure why the color did not come out like you planed, but natural light is best place to do your mixing, everything looks different under light bulbs unless you buy very expensive special natural light bulbs. No need to re-prime your trailer, that color will be a good base to spray the color you want over, helps hide blemishes if you have a dark color under your final coats (learned that hard way, white primer under green, shows scratches bad).

 

[Teamster]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Nothing wrong with Brown!!,...

Then again I work for UPSF, So I'm kind of partial to Brown,....lol,.....

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Well that makes me feel a bit better! I wasnt looking forward to reprimeing it! Im no color expert, but i am thinking if I add some white and maybe more blue, MAYBE I can fix it. It's just going to take time and more trials. Such is my luck! I can make the most simple tasks a challenge.

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Looking at maroon, best match I could come up with was 12 parts red, 10 parts blue and 7 parts yellow, add black/white to darken/lighten to taste...give you a starting point anyways...of course my idea of maroon and yours could vary so adjust as needed.

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Yellow huh? Interesting! It's more of a burgundy than a maroon, though. Kind of has a purple undertone to it. If you Google 'Texas a&m maroon', thats pretty much the color. We are on our way back from a day of riding bulls but I think I can muster up the energy to mess with the mix some more when we get home.

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

That's pretty close to the color I came up with in that measurement...might add just a touch of black to darken that mix but not much...using red blue and yellow you can make any color imaginable pretty much...that's why computer printers use CYMK Ink cartridges (C= cyan [blue], Y= Yellow, M= Magenta [red], K=Black) toying with those 3 colors will get ya where you want to go. black will darken, white will lighten. It takes very little black to darken a color, but a lot of white to lighten one.

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

did a little more, and got you a formula that you can make 1 Quart batches, there are 32 oz. in a quart, so if you do13 oz red, 8 oz yellow, 11 oz blue, should get you a decent maroon. lemme know it works out for ya...to test you can get an eye dropper and mix a tiny batch using R-13 drops , Y-8 drops and B-11 drops

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Well, it was dark when we pulled in to the drive, but my wife said "Hey, it's maroon now!"... and sure enough, it looks maroon. I brought one of the fenders in to the house and it was maroon (just as it was last night). I took it out to garage and put it under the fluorescent light and it looks better, but I'm still seeing brown. I took out my pieces of sample carpet and it was close (it could have more purple/blue in it, but oh well). My wife says it's fine but I'm not going to commit one way or another with the color until tomorrow when I can give it a GOOD look in natural light.

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Oops, didn't see your posts Judge. Thanks for doing that research! I don't know why I didn't think to do this before, but I'll have to check some other stores and see if they carry a Rustoleum blue. Lowes has red and yellow, but no blue. According to the Rustoleum site, they have a blue. That may have eliminated my problem right off the bat. I'm wondering if my problem was because of how I thinned the artists oil. I tried acetone and it didn't work too well so I used turpentine. It worked great, but I'm wondering if it didn't do something to the overall formula once I mixed it in to the Rusto or if maybe I over-thinned it.

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

yeah, if you use 3 rustoleum protective enamels of different colors, no thinning necessary, once you have your mix, then thin and add hardener right before spraying, well 30 minutes before to give hardener time to activate anyways. Things will look different in given light, so be sure it looks the way you want in natural light, because most people wont see it under florescent lights. The coat you have on now will work great for hiding the primer making next coat easier to apply. Looking forward to seeing what ya finally come up with...you got more guts then me! I would just go to Sherwin-Williams and have them custom mix a color for me, if I hadn't found premixed in the shades I liked

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Funny you mention Sherwin-Williams. My wife suggested I do that but I told her they would probably charge me an arm and a leg to do it. Well, let's see what I'm up to here: $25 for 3 quarts of Safety Red Rustoleum. $14 for two small tubes of blue artists oil. $7 for one small tube of black artists oil (which I haven't used). $14 for one large tube of blue artists oil (2 small tubes wasn't enough). $8 for a quart of black Rustoleum (which I haven't used). $15 for the turpentine and some other thinner that the lady at Hobby Lobby suggested. So that's in the ballpark of $80-$90 for not even a full gallon of paint. I'm quite sure it wouldn't have cost me that much had I have just gone to Sherwin-Williams! Luckily, my wife is quite the hobbyist and has a small business in it so that $80-90 isn't stuck entirely to the boat as waste. She will use the turpentine, the extra artists oil, and the black Rusto, and I'm sure we will be able to find a use for the remaining 2 quarts of the mixed stuff but still... I'm probably never going to hear the end of it with the "I told you so".

And now that it has been freshened up in my memory, I may just go to Sherwin-Williams tomorrow and talk to them before I make my next decision. I keep going out to the garage (as if the color would magically change?! HA!) and I just can't convince myself that it will be ok.

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

lol, funny you should mention going out to the garage...wife could not understand why i would sit out there and just stare at it for hours....its how I do my thinking. they should have oil based pigments (as should have Lowes, not sure why they used latex that time you went...this actually might be another thread I am referencing)

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Yeah, different thread you're thinking of... but I did ask both Lowes and Home Depot and neither would tint the Rusto. Something about codes not being in the computer or something. I wouldn't expect either place to have associates that were able to function at the paint counter without a computer, so I left it at that. At least at Sherwin-Williams, I would expect them to be more knowledgeable in paint and able to help me out. We will see tomorrow. My wife agreed to just cut the loss and go ahead with having it mixed professionally.

 

[fmjnax]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

Let the "I told you so" begin! I went over to Sherwin-Williams at lunch and gave them my carpet samples. Half an hour and $30 later, I have a gallon of paint in my truck that is a close match... and isn't even close to being brown. I think it may be a touch too purple, but he said to try it on a small section and let it dry. If it's not right, they're fix it. Why, oh why, didn't I just go there in the first place?!?!

It's raining here today and possibly tomorrow... and then Wednesday afternoon we are heading to Missouri for Thanksgiving, so it looks like I will have to wait a while to give the paint a shot.

I took a picture of the paint and put it between my two carpet choices (we're probably going with the one on the right). It was still a touch too light so I had him darken it a bit after this picture was taken and this is before it dried. He said it would darken down a touch more once it dried. What do you think?

 

[JDA1975]

Re: 1984 Skeeter Champ 16' Restore

yeah, that looks sharp man...ohh btw...Told ya so!....hey if you head through North East Arkansas on your trip swing on by, good place to stretch the legs and get some grub! Enjoy your Thanksgiving, I know I plan to eat until my weight exceeds the safe operating weight of my boat!