Painting with Spectraflame Paint

Paint   airbrush   air source   lacquer thinner    paint stripper    metal polish

The first thing you have to do is take the redline apart. After drilling (be careful and dont drill into your hand) out the rivets and taking out the window and interior You will need to dip your redline casting in paint stripper. Most all Common strippers work. I like the thicker solution because it sits on the casting instead of running off. Once you have stripped all the paint off the casting you need to wash it. If you have a vidbe polisher now is the time to insert it and let it run for 8 hours.  Otherwise you need to polish the casting so you get a bright and shinny surface. You can archive this by using a buffing wheel. I use a metal polish to shine up the surface. A Shinny even surface is the key to set off the translucent spectraflame paint. I use Blue Magic polish which can be purchased most anywhere.

If your casting is in bad shape from dents you can bondo the holes. If this happens you will have simulate that shinny surface. To achieve that you will have to paint the casting a bright and shinny silver to simulate a polished casting. I use Alclad II.

Once you have your casting polished (or painted silver) you are now about ready to shoot the car with the spectraflame paint. If you have buffed a shinny surface you will need clean the casting off good with lacquer thinner. This removes all the oils and dirt. Do this a few times with lacquer thinner on a rag. The first coats of spectraflame paint are very light coats called tack coats. This is accomplished by applying just enough paint on the surface so it almost covers the entire surface area. Think of the first coat of paint as a piece of sandpaper where the casting is the paper and the sand grits are particles of paint. The sand on sandpaper covers the paper but does not stack sand grits on other sand grits. What this tack coat does is break all the surface tension on the casting and allowing the paint to stick on the surface rather than balling up or rolling. Otherwise if you start stacking paint molecules on top of each other without a tack coat your paint will start to separate and ball up just like oil on water.

After you have your tack coat laid down you can now apply a good coat of spectraflame. The paint will stick to the surface and flow creating a smooth and even look. Make sure that you lay enough paint down so it flows and looks wet. Keep applying coats of paint until you get your desired intensity of spectraflame. If you did not use hardener then After a few hours you can now clear coat over your spectraflame. This will protect the paint from chipping or scratching off. Just remember It does not matter how many coats of clear you apply, but the quality. Someone who lays a single clear coat down will have a better looking paint job over someone who lays multiple layers of clear coat. I hightly recommend our hardener it save time and money. Just use a resporator and good ventilation.