Hey, it’s Tony. Thanks for watching my video and checking out the blog today. Today, I’ll share with you my secrets to spraying silver base coat.
If you’re not like Chip Foose and you’re not a great artist nor can draw cars like crazy with graphics, but you want to design graphics on your motorcycle or car, I’ll tell you an easy way to do it.
Take a picture or go on the internet and print a black and white copy of your project. Just like what I did with my bike. It gives you a general idea of what you can do with your project and how you want it to look.
Check out the video as I show you what I did.
I basically took a picture of my bike and printed it out in black and white to draw my own graphic on it.
This is a pretty cool way to get an idea of what you want to do with your car. I’ve printed a few pages and drew out some of my ideas.
On the sides, I want it be silver. I just didn’t have the markers to make it light silver like I wanted. The rims are also going to be silver.
I was thinking of doing some flames and had different versions of it. If you don’t like it, you can throw it out.
I’m doing the whole bike green and we’re going to have some black graphics. This is just paint graphics.
If you want to go crazy, go ahead. I was thinking of doing a flame job but then decided against it since I’ve done a ton of flames before.
I’m kind of tired of flames. I just want to do something different and simple. We’re going to do black at the back as well as the fairings at the bottom.
We already painted our frames and rims. I may do some silver graphic and turning some parts of it black.
But, I like the green on this bike to stand out. I’m going to make it silver where the number decal is. Let’s just see how it comes out.
When you’re done with your car or bike, you can buy a graphic kit set and put decals on top of your paint to make it pop even more. That’s what I plan to do.
I’m going to be getting some Yamaha stickers and dress it up a little bit more. But, I just want to lay a pretty cool foundation for the bike as far as painted color.
I’m going with the black, green and silver foundation. Then, we can get some white Yamaha decal on the black at the bottom and a silver Yamaha decal on the green.
Now, we are going to mix our silver basecoat. I’ll use half a pint of silver basecoat and add some reducer. When you’re doing basecoat, remember it’s a 1:1 mixture.
I’m going to fill the bottle up to the neck with reducer and mix it up. So now, we have our basecoat.
I plan to give the whole bike a silver basecoat. Hopefully, I have enough.
This way, when the green goes on top of it, the green will pop even more because you have a light silver basecoat under it. This will also be foundation of the silver graphic that I will be doing.
When you have your spray gun, make sure that you have your neck filter in your gun. I always like to have a high fluid flow.
So if I tighten my fluid flow all the way, my trigger is not going to go down. Watch the video as I demo and explain a little bit more.
I’ll show you how to adjust the fan once we put some paint and start painting. You also want to make sure that you filter your paints before putting it in the gun.
So, now that we’ve put our paint in the gun, we’ll go ahead and tack all of our pieces down.
So, you want to make sure that you open up a brand new tack rag all the way. Open it all the way as shown in the video. Then, you fold it up to an eighth size.
When you tack your panel down, don’t rub hard. You just want to coat the surface. Go over the surface lightly because the glue is going to come off and you’ll get a little bit of glue on your panel.
You’ll notice that your hands will feel sticky when you’re done. So, you’ll have to clean your hands off with a little reducer or lacquer thinner.
Or, you can use gloves but they’ll get sticky too so you’ll also need to throw them out or clean them as well.
When laying your first coat, you can do your edges first. But, I like to do my edges in the end. In the beginning, I’m just getting the whole panel but later you’ll see me go around the whole thing and then the edges.
Make sure you get all of your edges because your paint job will look really bad if you miss your edges.
If you see the white areas on the panel, that means we just sanded through to the primer. It’s not a big deal. When you do your coats, you just want to make sure to cover it up.
If they are large, what I would do is to hit those areas first and let them dry. If you just repaired certain parts of the car and you have primer spots all over the car, you want to hit those areas with base first.
You can get that in the Rav4 series within the LearnAutoBodyAndPaint VIP Course. So make sure you check out the VIP Course.
In all of your paint jobs, you want to make sure that you cover those white areas because the last thing you want is to have a finished paint job and have areas where you don’t have enough color on it.
It’s not a big deal on this bike project because we’re also going to do a green basecoat on it. But, we still want to fully cover it with silver.
I did about three coats of paint on the tank and all of the pieces. I went over the tank twice on one spraying session. That’s basically two coats and I think I went over it one last time. I used up all my silver base coat.
After this, we’re going to clean our gun and mask up our two-tone graphic up because we’re going to have some silver parts on this.
So, I show you my routine right after I spray my base coat. I empty my paint gun and put a little bit of lacquer thinner in it. Then, shake it out, pull my trigger a couple of times to basically get the silver out of the gun.
Then, I get a rag or a little paper towel and wipe clean the tip. You can also take the tip off and clean the tip quick.
Then, clean the cap. And, clean around the top of the cup with lacquer thinner. You have to keep it clean so it opens and closes nice and easily.
Then, pour all of the lacquer thinner in a cup and throw it out when you’re done.
We just want to wash the silver paint out with lacquer thinner. Then, put it back in the gun rack because right after I mask, we’re going to put some green paint in it and do our green base coat.
A lot of the questions I get is, “After my base coat, how long do I wait before I start masking for graphics?”
A lot of it depends on the weather. If it’s cool, you may have to wait a little longer. About forty-five minutes to an hour and a half before you start putting some tape.
Right now, we have a nice temperature and it’s dry. It just took us about half an hour to wait. We have our fine line tape and we’ll start masking out our tank graphic.
I’m going to start masking it up. Then, I’m going to tape it up because I’m keeping the silver. Lastly, we’ll spray over our green basecoat on top of it.
Once we put our green basecoat on top of it, our silver basecoat is going to make our green pop even more. It’s going to look really nice.
It’s Tony from LearnAutoBodyAndPaint. I hope you enjoyed the video. Don’t forget to Like, Share and Subscribe to my videos.
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Talk soon! Cheers!
-Tony
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