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Have you ever used any fish eye eliminator in your guns? I have been told ( I don't know if is true) That once you use it you will always have to use it in that gun. I am sorry you had to go through all of that to find your problem but at least you found it.

Originally Posted by Mr Smith

Have you ever used any fish eye eliminator in your guns? I have been told ( I don't know if is true) That once you use it you will always have to use it in that gun. I am sorry you had to go through all of that to find your problem but at least you found it.

No fisheye eliminator, they were new out of the box, but I believe you are 100% right on that. In conversation with my paint guy he shared that fisheye eliminator is basically silicone, and the intent is to turn the entire paint layer into one big fisheye to equalize the surface tension. In a production shop, then if the guy puts his gun in the collective gun washer he introduces silicone into the wash process, and often results in a fisheye problem for everyone until they purge the system and clean everything. I have two good coats on everything, and I think I am going to do one more for grins and then hit it with a final sugar coat and be done. It is not near show quality, but it looks pretty good at this point.

Roger I heard the same thing from the local paint shop. They recogmend not to use the fisheye eliminator, but to clean everything really well, and use filters at the base of the gun like you already have. Don't know what will happen when I join you this fall for the same thing!

Scooter and Dsprint, thanks for the kind words on the project. To my knowledge there's no silicone around.

Bob, 34-40, Mr Smith, Jack, thanks for suggestions and tips. Everything I learn here is valuable knowledge, often paid for by sweat, frustrations and a few thrown wrenches in the past.

Steve, I didn't sand away as much as I put on, but I sanded away a lot of paint! It's not perfect by any means, but looking at that chassis and components is a very satisfying step in the learning process for me.

This is fresh out of the booth area after an overnight drying time, and today I get to sand it down again, but this time with 1500 grit and lots of water and Ivory soap to take a few flaws away. It's hard to get a decent shot of paint indoors in bad lighting, so I did the old ruler (engineer's scale ) reflection to give an idea.

Originally Posted by rspears

To my knowledge there's no silicone around.

.........

Does your clothes dryer vent anywhere near the shop, or does the normal airflow around the house where it vents carry toward the shop?

Roger - that chassis really looks nice (even if it isn't powder coat). I hope you threw that HF purple POS away. Mine lasted about long enough to spray a bit of epoxy primer and turn some parts of my garage gray from overspray. Then I bought an Iwata......... A $20 POS to a $450 gun in one easy step - well really two. My primer gun is a Finishline 3, with a nice Sharpe in between that ended up surplus (Mike - have you tried it yet?)

Originally Posted by IC2

Roger - that chassis really looks nice (even if it isn't powder coat). My primer gun is a Finishline 3, with a nice Sharpe in between that ended up surplus (Mike - have you tried it yet?)

Nope, not yet. I hope to in September / October.
Roger, the frame is lookin' awesome!

Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter

Does your clothes dryer vent anywhere near the shop, or does the normal airflow around the house where it vents carry toward the shop?

Bob,
That is good, out of the box thinking, but should not be an issue here. The shop is 150' from the end of the house and the dryer vent is around back.

I did lots of "no-no's" due to lack of experience - I soaked the frame in WD40 to prevent surface rust in the unheated barn and before painting I should have loaded my spray gun with lacquer thinner and flooded the chassis and parts several times to wash it away, vs hand wiping with blue paper towels wet with thinner several times; I used cloth rags that had been dried with fabric softener sheets at one point (just before fisheyes); I added Dawn "Plus" in my wash water once (just before fisheyes); I had a wasp invasion one afternoon while sanding, and sprayed them airborn with insectiside (has parafins to stick to the critters); and my wax & grease remover approach was to wet a rag, wipe wet & wipe dry vs putting the liquid in a spray bottle, wetting the surface and then drying with a clean paper cloth. What is boggling is that my first coats of primer were fine, then all of a sudden I got the evil eye. In chasing potential problems and eliminating things by re-cleaning, changing approach, new hose, etc, time past and primer cured more. Time may have been the solution, but having a good SATA gun for a day was a big, big improvement in my control. Of course, it may have been that the Fisheye Spirit got tired of my shop, and rode the wind to another place.... or it may be resting, waiting for me to get the gun out again, too.

Sometimes the devil is involved!

I'll give the short version of my tale of woe. Nearly two decades ago a pretty new car was brought to the shop for a minor repair and panel refinish. The first refinish came off in sheets. This caused us to have to expand our paint field (for color match reasons, a tough to match, light goldish color). This happened again and again to where my painter was at wits end, and we got my supplier involved and they had two of their expert painters redo it....twice more! Long story short, we completely repainted that car three times before it finally stuck, and to this day don't know what the real problem was. My suspicion was the "clear coat protectant" that the dealers typically sold for $300 or so. But the dealer was a referral source so we did lots of cars that they treated. We used every precleaning process known at the time. No other job in the shop shot with the same materials, same painter, same equipment, same environment, yada yada, had this kind of failure. In the end we named it the "Camry from Hell" and were extremely happy to see it go away.